The future of crime fighting is moving away from reacting to incidents as they occur and towards ‘predicting’ crime in order to prevent it. The LAPD have already spoken about using earthquake models to predict crime ‘aftershocks‘; now, The Australian Crime Comission are scanning massive sets of data to examine criminal threats across the country. They have spent $14.5 million over the last four years developing big data systems to identify these trends, meaning they can take a more proactive approach to identifying and tackling crime.

However, speaking at the CeBIT tech conference in Sydney, ACC chief information officer Maria Milosavljevic was keen to emphasise that their work was less about the idea of predicting specific crimes, and more about examining ‘a threat that is increasing, and predicting that it is going to continue to increase based on what we’ve seen in the past’. Discussing the importance and possibilities of Big Data, she stated ‘We live in an algorithmic age, we live in an age where we have access to a lot of information and we’ve moved to a world where strategy and vision setting can be adjusted on the basis of what we can see in information’.

One advantage the ACC have found in analysing huge amounts of data is that it broadens crime fighting beyond one particular jurisdiction. By having a much wider, national view of crime patterns, they are able to identify which areas are tackling the same problems and pool their resources. Milosavljevic also stated that being able to identify threats faster and with greater accuracy means response time is shorter, and that information can be shared between partners with greater speed and efficiency.

Moving forward, the ACC are looking at how to incorporate more unstructured audio and visual data into their analysis. Milosavljevic highlighted the variety of data beyond text and spreadsheets as one of the main challenges facing the system- ‘There are some tools that allow you to do some things but it’s limited’.

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(Image credit: Simon Yeo)

According to Wade Baker, the main author behind the ‘Data Breach Investigations Report’ series:  “After analysing 10 years of data, we realise most organisations cannot keep up with cybercrime – and the bad guys are winning. … But by applying big data analytics to security risk management, we can begin to bend the curve and combat cybercrime more effectively and strategically.”

The findings will make fighting cyberthreats more targeted, though still a daunting task since organisations may not even realise they have been compromised.  The nine patters named by the DBIR are:    “miscellaneous errors such as sending an email to the wrong person; crimeware (various malware aimed at gaining control of systems); insider/privilege misuse; physical theft/loss; Web app attacks; denial of service attacks; cyberespionage; point-of-sale intrusions; and payment card skimmers.”

Additionally, the report noted that while 92% of attacks well into these nine categories, hackers were even less versatile, using just three patterns for over 70% of any security breaches on average, per industry branch.  Using the power of big data, these trends are finally emerging and the defences against cyberattacks can be more properly and strategically shored up.

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(Image Credit:  Linus Bohman)

A novel service from Swan Island Networks crunches through and filters, then combines and aggregates information from a broad variety of big data sources to produce targeted alerts for cities.  First rolled out in 2004, the technology is currently in use by over 250 commercial customers to connect different agencies and information sources.

“Trusted Information Exchange Service [TIES] promises to allow city managers to create and share real-time common operating pictures of their cities,” said Charles Jennings, CEO of Swan, a Portland, Ore.-based provider of situational intelligence software and services. “There is everyday value and the ability to use this in a crisis to stay on top of what is happening.”

Offering both detailed dashboards to privately collect and assess data from a certain city, as well as a more general view providing information to the general public, TIES has already seen use during several recent emergencies, including at Fukushima after the tsunami and nuclear power plant meltdown, the shootings in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina hit.   Collaboration across cities using this technology is also a possibility, allowing them to learn from one another’s experiences.

Robert Dodge, president of Dodge Global, an international risk management consultancy, was an early adopter of TIES, calling it “intelligence-led risk management.”  He went on to say:  “I saw a ton of potential to aggregate data and visualize it… With TIES, all this information could be presented on one screen.”   TIES uses CAP (Common Alerting Protocol), a data format used for sharing critical data between agencies, which is also used by all 50 states and 19 federal agencies in the form of NIEM (National Information Exchange Model).

Microsoft’s CityNext initiative, which is offered in conjunction with TIES, is now looking forward to how to help cities connect to the cloud better, and reap the benefits economically and developmentally.  As Jennings puts it, without the cloud trawling through this quantity of data would be unfeasible, but using the cloud based services, the options are limitless.

(Image Credit:  Richie Diesterheft)