Page 51 - Security Today, May 2018

Dealer Strategies
where it’s at today,” said Jim Chiacchia, di- rector of Global Security Operations Center (GSOC) and situational awareness services at Allied Universal.
The information gathered isn’t just for de- cisions to be made right now, but Chiacchia said this information is often gathered by customers making long-term business deci- sions, regarding safety and security around the globe, including the safety and security of employees stationed throughout the world.
So, where does this information come from, who gathers it and who really cares?
First, those people living and working in the C-suites care and are extremely con- cerned with the information scraped from the Internet. Consider the Internet as an iceberg. Let’s say 10 percent of that iceberg is visible to an ocean going vessel. That means 90 percent is well hidden underneath the wa- ter line. This is the Dark Web. This is the part of the Internet where unseemly and shady things are taking place. This is the part of the iceberg where bad things occur.
“This is where we scrap for information for our customers so they are on the front end, and know what is ‘happening’ before it happens,” Brawner said. “A huge percentage of what happens on the Dark Web is asso- ciated with illegal or illicit activity. Our goal is to use every tool available, including ma- chine learning, to keep our customers secure. These threats are very real; and can rattle anyone from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies and their employees.
“In our security operations center, we use tools to collect information and review the data with a security risk analyst. This al- lows us to be proactive to the risk indicators that we find.”
There is an abundance of information on the Dark Web, and the trial comes with be- ing able to distill down all the information gathered, and make sense of it. For instance, prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, there was a lot of information or traf- fic but there was not the ability to distill all that information to a concise point. That has changed today with tools that allow basic algorithms to function in machine learning and the ability to spot and define risks.
DO SOMETHING
Now the security motto may well be: See something, say something, do something.
Predictive analysis plays a key role in ev- eryday living as well. A great example may well be at a shopping mall where a store em-
ployee sees something a little bit out of order in the mall area, but does not want to be iden- tified. That employee is now able to share vi- sual information without being revealed, and in real time. The employee observes someone taking pictures of children at the mall, which seems out of place. An alert is posted, and the man is picked up for questioning. As it turns out, this was an actual event, and a predator was identified.
“There is no doubt that innocent lives were spared from the future actions of a known criminal perpetrator that day,” Brawner said. “This is a tool that Allied Uni- versal uses, and in this case, the mall was a customer and able to respond accordingly.”
Brawner also shared an experience of predictive analysis where a couple of robbery suspects went into a mall store and assaulted the store staff and took cash and merchan- dise. A robot was deployed to the mall at this time and was able to capture a list of cell phones in the area. The robot was queued to advise security staff when any one of those numbers were found in the mall area again. Sure enough, the analysis worked perfectly and one of the suspects was arrested at a later date. Allied Universal partners with robot manufacturer Knightscope, as well as Ro- botic Assistance Devices’ technology, both based in California.
MAKING THE CITY SAFE
Allied Universal has introduced a safe cit- ies program, in which it allows downtown businesses, and in particular clients among
them, to share input and results of situational awareness information. It was the result of a program that began in the New York City area and has been introduced in several sub- sequent cities, including Los Angeles, Den- ver, Dallas and the Washington, D.C. area.
“Eighty percent of downtown Dallas is covered by Allied Universal security ser- vices and its onsite security officers, so we are poised with our technology to be able to share information if something were to hap- pen,” Brawner said. “As technology evolves, so will our ability to communicate more ef- fectively, using social media can provide ex- ceptionally quick information we can collect, analyze and act upon with our GSOC tools.”
With more than 150,000 employees, Al- lied Universal is one of the largest employ- ers in the United States. The company is well known for its guarding services but is quickly evolving into a technology resources firm. They have 20,000 client sites in North America. The Dallas Monitoring and Re- sponse Center was acquired about four years ago from the Thrive Group and has about 80 staff members working around the clock in its security operations center (SOC).
The staff is still growing in the Dallas lo- cation, and there is plenty of room for expan- sion in the 24,000 square foot facility, which also is moving forward to help some clients establish their own outsourced GSOC at the MaRC.
Ralph C. Jensen is the editor in chief at Security Today magazine.
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