2022 Retrospective

SMAT strives to be as accessible, transparent, and open as possible in order to best support researchers working at the edge of some of the most dangerous aspects of the modern internet. We are deeply honored by and grateful for the support towards our work and values.

Investigations

We performed a massive investigation that identified several hundred Russian war criminals in Ukraine via open source material. This was part of a larger effort aimed at exposing Kremlin atrocities in UA in which we made additional contributions to OSINT research community materials related to the invasion. We also released an investigation on state information attacks utilizing Telegram. We released a report on BitChute’s knowing hosting of Holocaust denial content in violation of the UK’s new policies via OFCOM.

Network Graph Tool

Stay tuned for a more public release!

We will regularly post updates about network graph on our Twitter account and here on the blog.

We are in the final stage of development of a live point-and-click network graphing tool for exploring cross-platform threats. This tool is completely cutting-edge across industry and academia and turns flat data into the complex relations that actually better explain online threats. By natively supporting queries across multiple platforms along a range of connections we empower users to spot things like state-backed disinformation and astroturfing as well as key players seeding malicious campaigns across a range of platforms. The network tool which we aim to launch soon, solves numerous open problems in the field of OSINT as well as scholarly and journalistic research into these phenomena. 

Media Tool

We quickly created and deployed a media library analysis tool to search contextualized files from a range of platforms. We shared this tool with teams investigating war crimes and false flags in Ukraine. This allows researchers to quickly sort through terabytes of media data, like images and videos, that SMAT collects from the data sources we crawl.

User & Community Growth

Currently SMAT engages its community across three main mediums - our substack blog, our trusted slack server and our public Twitter account. All three surfaces have seen user growth in 2022.

The SMAT research community published half a dozen blog posts this year. Our investigative reporting on War Criminals we found in our VK collections saw 8,332 engagements to date. 

We are regularly observing testimonials from researchers, activists and other organizations in the community which highlight the utility of our research and tools. These examples show users exploring SMAT to unlock insight and protect themselves from online hate. In addition to its public free users, SMAT has grown its paid customer pool dramatically over the last year as well, for example by on-boarding 2 public civil rights organizations. 

Over this period, SMAT was additionally able to offer a wide range of OSINT support to media rooms and journalists across the world exploring threats from the fringe internet. For example teaching specific skills related to search and archive on fringe platforms, as well as providing research support itself on leads provided by the journalists.

New Sources

Lastly, we added new sources to the free and public tools (API and web-app) we make available including:

Thank you!

Thank you to our community of researchers and contributors. Looking forward to building more together in 2023!