Greetings investigators!
LinkScope version 1.2.0 was just released! Download the installer for the software from the ‘Downloads’ page.
There are a lot of improvements (and bug fixes) in this version of the software; in this blog post, we will go over the most significant one: Collectors.
During investigations, it sometimes is necessary to monitor a data source for a period of time, and be alerted when something happens. What you want to monitor could be anything – different companies have different needs. For example, departments focusing on third party risk management would be on the lookout for negative media regarding any of their business partners; cyber security professionals would instead want to monitor the dark web, hacker forums and paste sites for any mentions of their organization, and so on and so forth.
You might even want to have different things happen based on what you observe, ignore certain behaviors, or even dynamically expand the scope of your monitoring based on different events. All of this is now possible through Collectors!
Collectors run on LinkScope Server deployments. On the server, various different harvesters gather data from all manner of different sources, and Collectors pick and choose which pieces of data are relevant to them, whenever it is made available. Collectors then return such data to the client, either immediately in the form of an email / notification in your workplace communications platform of choice, e.g. Teams, Slack etc., or whenever the client next connects to the server, in the form of desktop notifications and new entities being generated in the project database.
Each Collector is configurable, and multiple instances of each can be ran concurrently. A Collector that collects negative media for example, can be ran once for each company you wish to monitor, and send notifications in different ways to different people – for example, one could receive an email, another could get a Teams notification, etc. Alternatively, you could run just one instance of the Collector, and have it monitor every company by itself.
Collectors are a powerful and versatile tool for data source monitoring which should be in every investigator’s arsenal.
Best Wishes,
AccentuSoft