Recorded Future
 |
|
| Privately Held | |
| Industry | Internet |
| Founded | 2009 |
| Founders | Christopher Ahlberg, Staffan Truvé |
| Headquarters | Somerville, Massachusetts, United States |
|
Area served
|
Worldwide |
| Products | Recorded Future |
|
Number of employees
|
84 (February 2016) |
| Website | recordedfuture |
Recorded Future is an Internet technology company founded in 2009, based in Somerville, Massachusetts, United States, and Gothenburg, Sweden, specializing in real-time threat intelligence. Recorded Future organizes the entire Web for analysis so information security teams can stay ahead of cyber attacks. In October 2015, Recorded Future announced a program called OMNI that delivers their data to third-party platforms like Splunk, HP ArcSight, IBM QRadar, RSA Archer, and Maltego.[1]
Contents
Services
Using what they call a "Temporal Analytics Engine," Recorded Future (RF) provides forecasting and analysis tools to help analysts predict future events by scanning sources on the Internet, and extracting, measuring, and visualizing the information to show networks and patterns in the past, present, and future.[2] As of 2015[update] the engine was described as "Web Intelligence Engine."[3] Likewise, the Washington Post which had described the company as a predictive analytics Web intelligence firm deleted the term upon request of RF.[4] The software analyzes sources and forms "invisible links" between documents to find links that tie them together and may possibly indicate the entities and events involved. Noah Schachtmann from WIRED – who first wrote about Google and the CIA both investing in RF – described the company in an interview as follows: "Recorded Future is a company that strips out from Web pages the sort of who, what, when, where, why — sort of who’s involved, [...] where are they going, what kind of events are they going to."[5]
Clients initially included the financial sector with quantitative investors, but since 2013 they have changed to businesses seeking cyber security, per Ahlberg, for example SITA (IT company), a global air transport IT company.[6]
Organization
The company was founded in 2009 by Christopher Ahlberg[3] and had 20 employees as of November 2011.[7] In 2009, Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel invested "under $10 million each" into the Recorded Future shortly after the company was founded. Google published this on May 3, 2010[8] In-Q-Tel is an investment arm of the CIA.[9] As of 2015[update] it had partnerships with IBM, HP ArcSight, Cimation, Ethnographic Edge, and Malformity Labs LLC per its company profile published by Businessweek.[3]
Analysis
Al-Qaeda Report
In May 2014, Recorded Future released a report called "How Al-Qaeda Uses Encryption Post-Snowden (Part 1)."[10] Part 2 of the report was released on August 1, 2014, supposedly with a strengthened "earlier hypothesis about Snowden leaks influencing Al-Qaeda’s crypto product innovation." On the same day National Public Radio aired Recorded Future claims of "tangible evidence" that Edward Snowden harmed national security by prompting terrorists to develop more sophisticated encryption programs.[11] Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman criticized the NPR report in an article on August 12, 2014.[12]
Occupy Wall Street Media Monitoring Report
In 2011, Recorded Future reported, "... gaining online momentum for the Occupy Wall Street movement. When we look more carefully at influencers in this discussion using our Influencer Map, we find that Iran Press TV is the second largest influencer after the U.S. media!"[13]
Controversies
In April 2015, a coding website accused Recorded Future of violating Internet privacy by analyzing private Facebook messages, which it denied. The accusation was disproven when the assumed private link for private Facebook chat was found posted publicly online via a server log.[6]
See also
References
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