We are living in extraordinary times. The Covid-19 health crisis changed our lives in ways we could not have imagined only two years ago. Everyone began to spend exponentially more time on the internet – working, learning, entertaining, shopping – moving crime from the street to the virtual world and creating new classes of cyber criminals and victims. In the end what we ended up with in our hands is more than a physical pandemic.

The twin pandemics of Covid-19 and cybercrime continue to hit people and industries hard, leaving societies and the business world facing unprecedented challenges and growing uncertainty. Cyber criminals have taken advantage of this new normal and deepened their activities, increasing both the number and the scope of their attacks. When a certain criminal activity was blocked, they responded by committing new, more innovative crimes. They adapted their aim, moving from well-protected destinations to more vulnerable ones. They adapted their tools and started converging in new cyber spaces. They began carrying attacks in the physical world, impacting critical infrastructure and more.

As if Covid-19 wasn’t enough, malware, spyware, and Trojans have been embedded in malicious coronavirus websites. Millions of people from around the world have visited these sites to access interactive maps and statistics, and to get important health information. Criminals have even pretended to be from the World Health Organization. Businesses have been hit hard by ransomware attacks and more than a few yielded and ended up paying the money the criminals demanded.

In this new era, more and more investigators and private corporations – big and small – took a step back and analyzed what they were doing right, what they could do better, and what had to change. For the first time, many turned to digital forensics solutions, OSINT frameworks, and network monitoring software to be more efficient and effective in their efforts to prevent such attacks and achieve better protection.

These solutions improve crime prevention as well as investigative undertakings as they leverage the immense powers of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational thinking. Sitting at the intersection of these technologies, a good web intelligence solution can help detect anomalies before it’s too late, leading to better decisions and preventative action.

At Cobwebs, since the twin pandemics hit, we too have adapted and further improved our solutions to meet the intensified demands of our times. In fact, our efforts were recognized by the fifth annual CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards program, which chose us for the Threat Intelligence Platform of the Year Award 2021.

We have worked hard to make web and social intelligence accessible and impactful. We enhanced our network monitoring tools with which governments and businesses can achieve quick and thorough threat detection. On the other side of the cyber coin is the use of networks for carrying out physical actions and attacks – think Colonial Pipeline. Here too our highly targeted solutions offer investigators a great resource – including cyber forensics tools such as face detection, face recognition, sentiment analysis, criminal record checks, criminal background checks, and image recognition.