Tracking The Culprit: SEC Technologies And Fraunhofer IPK Deliver Technology To Identify Criminal Activities In Enterprise Networks

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Violence, extremism, and crimes against children: A lot of criminal activities are conveyed in images and distributed via internet and social media. But how can companies reasonably protect their networks and information systems from such terrible and wicked misuse?

Clearly, Enterprise network operators do not want to be unwitting accomplices for crimes or hacktivism. SEC Technologies, and Fraunhofer IPK, two premier information security research organizations, have collaborated to create the “Traffiic” platform for content analysis. Traffiic   identifies inappropriate materials by combining text and image analysis with machine learning, which triggers alerts in content and context with remarkable accuracy.

The result of the jointly-developed technology is Traffiic, a software platform that discovers and catalogs questionable content and provides Enterprise customers with the first practical mechanism to protecting the firm from contextual abuses of their infrastructure. The Traffiic platform is a modular, passive system designed to integrate into any enterprise network with minimal management overhead. Traffiic technology works in the background as an ever-present sentinel guarding against criminal activity continuously.

High Quality Technology Against Violent Crime

Fraunhofer IPK developed a new system which detects acts of abuse by combining text and image analysis with machine learning. To achieve a high detection rate with a low error rate a few different, specialized and intelligent “classifiers” are used. So, for example, the first “classifier” recognizes erotic images. Such a “positive” finding activates another “classifier”, which was trained to recognize crimes against children. Even the camera apparatus can be identified.

Markus Robin, General Manager SEC Consult: “Apprehending criminals and safeguarding victims was our guiding idea during the development of this technology. Studies show that in hidden services, 80% of site visits were related to child abuse content. As cybersecurity experts it is also our responsibility to enable a safe world. More and more frequently, companies register a misuse of their network and infrastructure. That’s why we developed Traffiic – to support companies in their network protection, save them from the act of accomplice, and set measures against the horrible sharing of violent crimes.”

In the course of this project SEC Technologies developed solutions for detecting and analyzing critical content in networks. The module implemented for data extraction allows the identification of images and videos in the networks’ data streams and to extract and store them for analysis. In addition to extracting the files, evaluating the source of an image is of central importance. Based on previous data analyses, another module for the evaluation of network sources investigates the reputation of the system in question by linking and examining different data sources like Who-is-data bases and IP reputation services. As a result, the system’s reputation can be included in the evaluation of an image. This significantly enhances the accuracy of the whole evaluation. Dr. Franz Fotr, court-certified IT-security expert, said at the workshop in Berlin: “I am delighted that the cooperation between SEC Technologies and the Fraunhofer IPK (Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology) bears fruit. The developments of the project Traffiic empower companies of all sizes to monitor their infrastructure and to protect it from attacks. That makes it significantly more difficult for criminals to misuse infrastructures and contributes to stopping the spread of child pornography.”