Searchlight Cyber adds AI-powered language translation to simplify dark web investigations

Searchlight Cyber has added AI-powered language translation into its dark web investigation and monitoring products DarkIQ and Cerberus.

This enhancement gives cybersecurity professionals instant access to precisely translated results in English, allowing them to search, monitor, and understand threats in the most frequently used languages on the dark web – representing over 94 percent of non-English content.

The full list of languages covered includes Russian, German, French, Spanish, Bulgarian, Indonesian, Turkish, Italian, Dutch, and standard Chinese.

The inability to translate and interpret dark web data in other languages hinders law enforcement and cybersecurity teams’ capacity to detect, understand, and accurately respond to emerging dark web threats. In the past, analysts and investigators would copy and paste content found on the dark web into generic translation tools, which can be time-consuming and error-prone.

It also makes it difficult to search for content using non-English terms. Furthermore, these tools often lack accuracy and may lead to missing critical information in dark web data.

Searchlight’s AI language translation tool is powered by a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system which has been trained on over 167 million of Searchlight’s dark web data points, including forums, marketplaces, and threat actor posts. NMT’s advantage lies in its ability to comprehend entire sentences and translate them into the target language, instead of one word at a time – mirroring a professional human translator’s approach. This increases the accuracy of the translation as the meaning of the sentence is captured.

Unlike conventional translation tools, Searchlight’s AI in-platform translation tool excels at accurately translating specialized dark web slang, particularly in Russian, which accounts for 66% of all non-English content on the dark web. This solution enhances the capabilities of law enforcement and cybersecurity professionals by providing seamless English searches and access to non-English content. This offers invaluable access to threat intelligence while preserving translation context, revolutionizing the way they navigate the dark web.

Dr Gareth Owenson, CTO of Searchlight Cyber said: “Identifying and responding to threats within the dark web is inherently complex, especially when dealing with non-English content. Our in-platform translation directly addresses this issue, providing cybercrime investigators, threat intelligence analysts, and law enforcement officers with instant access to precisely translated results. Our system far outperforms traditional translations tools in delivering contextually accurate translations, including comprehensive support for Russian dark web slang. This enhancement aligns with our ongoing commitment to automation and forms part of many AI advancements we have in our pipeline.”

This new feature in Cerberus and DarkIQ will deliver immediate value for law enforcement and cybersecurity teams, helping them in their work to combat and mitigate threats emerging from the dark web. Key benefits include:

• One-click translation: Saving time and effort, with the ability to revert back to the original language version if required.
• Ability to search for non-English language content using English search terms: Vastly improving the ability to find relevant intelligence on dark web marketplaces, forums, and other hidden sites.
• Increased accuracy: Enabling them to make faster connections, gather critical intelligence, and ultimately take more decisive action with the comfort of information that can be trusted.