Internet Intelligence: Uncovering the digital truth

The Internet has grown exponentially as a marketing platform over the past decade. Standards and guidelines have been established, but the Internet remains unregulated, unpoliced and opinionated, a place where billions of users exchange their ideas on companies, products, people and events, among other things. Did you know that about 60 billion Internet pages are hosted on the surface web, accessible through the use of conventional search engines, while about 30,000 billion pages, containing vital data, remain hidden in the deep web, out of reach of traditional search engines?

Internet intelligence is about using advanced proprietary tools, methodologies and investigation skills to dig deep into the World Wide Web. It is also about the ability to identify content on the Internet relating to a particular person, product, company or issue.

Social media has had a tremendous impact on the world these last few years, with an estimated one in three web surfers all over the world joining any one of the many networking sites on offer. Facebook has about 1 billion users, which is twice the population of the United States, and over 750 million photos were uploaded to the social media platform over New Year. Twitter, on the other hand, has over 500 million registered users and 250 million active ones, and about 327,000 tweets are sent each second. These enormous figures illustrate how massive the flow of data on social media platforms is, and Internet Intelligence techniques make it possible to tap into that. These techniques can be used to investigate conversations within social media platforms such as Twitter, or in forums, chat rooms, etc. to identify major proofs in specific cases.

• Over the years, Internet Intelligence techniques have been used in a number of cases, in different areas, such as:
• Personal reputational due diligence. Where it helped companies check details on specific individuals as part of their screening process, prior to an employment offer.
• Social networks. By monitoring web forums to identify individuals complaining about the specific companies. While forum posts may be anonymous, a close examination of these websites sometimes helps to clearly identify disgruntled individuals criticizing senior staffs and the overall ethics of the companies.
• Brand protection – Rebranding. Where companies commission an ‘‘Internet Brand Landscape’’, which involves an intensive period of web monitoring, followed by an analysis of the findings and a compilation of comprehensive reports identifying information relevant to legal counsel, marketing, security, intellectual property and customer services.
• Brand protection – Counterfeits. Where companies raise concerns at the increase of online companies operating in the same business. Using proprietary software capable of advanced image and text monitoring, numerous online companies advertising and/or selling in different languages are identified.
• Corporate reputational due diligence. Especially during acquisitions, when it is decided to extend the due diligence process to include the Internet, primarily to ensure that any commentary on the web supports the provisional valuation. A thorough review can unearth numerous discussions criticizing the company’s recent product reliability, customer support and overall corporate reputation, making it seem that, even though the past sales figures are respectable, the future of the company is in doubt. 

Decision makers need to have access to all available information before committing to a decision or course of action, and the whole concept of Internet Intelligence is the ability to search for the smallest piece of relevant information available on the Internet that can comfort them in their decision. It is about looking at different types of data and trying to figure out how they can bring greater value in a business decision-making process.

These past years, Mauritius has gone through a number of financial frauds, the biggest being the Ponzi scheme. The use of Internet Intelligence techniques at the right moment could surely have helped minimize losses triggered by this fraud. This could have been done by identifying victims discussing their concerns on the Internet, which would then have led to an earlier investigation into the Ponzi scheme. In Mauritius, Internet Intelligence can also be of help for the KYC (Know Your Client) procedure. So as to avoid financial fraud, the KYC process has become mandatory for all financial and banking institutions, and Internet Intelligence can be an essential asset for this procedure. Internet Intelligence techniques only access publicly available data.

Grant Thornton Mauritius, in collaboration with Grant Thornton UK, is launching this service in Mauritius. Grant Thornton’s Internet Intelligence team has a wealth of experience in the field of intelligence driven projects and the Grant Thornton UK Internet Intelligence team works closely with the eDiscovery and Digital Forensics groups to provide a complete forensic technology solution which brings a real value to the service.