Silobreaker used in Super Bowl 50 security operation

Image source - Norwich University

LONDON, UK, 8 March 2016 – Silobreaker announced today, at the UK Home Office Security & Policing event in Farnborough, that Norwich University, the oldest private military college in the U.S. and birthplace of the ROTC curriculum, partnered with Silobreaker as part of the security operation for Super Bowl 50.

Norwich University’s deployment of Silobreaker at the NFL’s showcase event marks the continuation of a partnership which began with the college’s announcement last year that they were using Silobreaker across all their cyber security classes, and as part of their Cyber Criminalistics, Cyber Investigation and Network Forensics programs.

Silobreaker’s threat intelligence product collects vast volumes of open source data from news, blogs, feeds and social media and provides the tools and visualisations for analysing and making sense of such data. By using Silobreaker, Norwich University’s analysts were able to identify and monitor threats leading up to and throughout Super Bowl 50. The breadth of the activity included open source intelligence related to personnel for both teams, ranging from players and executives to VIP guests, and encompassed the monitoring of local criminal activity, protests and other instabilities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The University’s representatives worked with a collection of public and private security experts tasked with ensuring that spectators, players and local residents were kept safe during the Super Bowl. The Norwich team was assembled under an invitation from the Santa Clara Police Department and the SB50 Critical Infrastructure & Cyber Protection Subcommittee, and operated from a pop-up intelligence operations centre located in an undisclosed location within the Bay Area.

Reflecting on the operation, Norwich University Vice President for Strategic Partners Phil Susmann commented: “Silobreaker enabled us to successfully plan for and monitor both cyber and non-cyber threats during this highly complex, national security event. We were able to keep an eye on relevant activity specifically within the Bay area and around Levi’s Stadium. The intelligence generated was then fed to law enforcement, ensuring that the Super Bowl was a safe and successful event.”

Kristofer Mansson, CEO of Silobreaker continued, “Silobreaker’s use in San Francisco during SB50 is a great demonstration of the benefits our product can bring to large scale security and policing operations. We are delighted to be associated with a successful and safe 50th Super Bowl”.