Warnings of Hezbollah  striking against United States interests have appeared sporadically over the last several years, but recent events around the globe seem to warrant real attention in considering the Iranian-sponsored group’s efforts to hit US and Israeli partners abroad and at home.

Using Recorded Future to look at the last four months related to attacks associated with Hezbollah, we find:

Click for interactive view

The timeline gives us a quick idea of when reported attacks really bubbled up, but even more interesting is to line up connections to Hezbollah for this initial timeframe compared to those with months prior. First, we’ll view a network of entities (locations, organizations, and people) associated with Hezbollah from December 2011 through March 2012:

Hezbollah Network - December 2011-March 2012

We find some of the very much expected locations – Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, – but we also see targets from India to Thailand to Azerbaijan to French interests that were either confirmed or alleged to be targets of Hezbollah attacks that are drawing attention to the group’s expanding scope of influence.

Next, we’ll shift the timeframe to describe connections from June 2011 to November 2011.

Click for live view with time slider

The reference to China in the network above comes from a write up by the Heritage Foundation blog the Foundry that suggests China is actually in the same market as Hezbollah for acquiring Club-K cruise missiles. And we’ve reported before on the now well known activity of Hezbollah in Latin America, primarily associations with drug cartels in Mexico.

So, the shift in recent months really does appear notable in the sense that these targets are quite different than previous targets more closely located to the group’s home base in Lebanon. It’s not the first time that connections have appeared in some of the locations, say for Thailand, which back in 2009 picked up weapons in Bangkok being transported to Hezbollah and Hamas from North Korea, but to actually carry out attacks there changes the game.

Keep an eye on where events related to Hezbollah are happening around the globe (view requires a Google Earth plug-in) using Recorded Future and set up an alert to make sure you’re monitoring activity as it happens.

In a rather tragic image, this timeline from Recorded Future shows reported incidences of self-immolation suggesting the tactic seems to be on the rise as a form of protest:

Click for Full Size

You can view the live visualization here.

Several weeks ago, we shared a view of travel events planned by world leaders to visit Europe during the first half of 2012. There were many interesting meetings and interactions to be examined, but one pair of events that stood out was the close proximity of visits to Cyprus by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s during mid-February and Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz at the end of February.

Territorial claims over Cyprus continue to be a contentious foreign policy item for Turkey, and are particularly divisive in its relations with Greece and the European Union. However, the confirmation of huge natural gas deposits in the neighboring Mediterranean waters claimed by Israel and Cyprus (dubbed the Leviathan gasfield) adds a new, potentially volatile element to Turkish relations in the area. Sending Yildiz to visit northern Cyprus shows its attempt to balance out the increasingly tight knit partnership between EU-friendly Israel and Cyprus related to natural gas fields in the region.

The timeline below shows how significantly the relations between Israel and Cyprus grew during the last two years with the callouts highlighting notable moments related to natural gas development:

The recent visit to Cyprus by Netanyahu comes several months after Turkey imposed further economic sanctions and severed military ties with Israel. The quote sitting at the bottom of the timeline is from Dr. Greg Reichberg, Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) Cyprus Centre, that suggests energy trade could impact Cyprus in two ways: act as a catalyst that helps resolve the territorial dispute, or potentially incite further conflict over valuable, non-renewable energy sources.

The next step for analyzing this situation at a high level is to evaluate major diplomatic efforts between both Israel and Turkey. The network below shoes diplomatic relation events for Israel and Turkey as reported during the last twelve months with the nodes connecting both countries showing separate interactions. While there are states such as Iran and Greece shown that are one-sided in these relations, others are connective states (France, Germany, the United States) that have much to lose should they be forced to take sides due to heightened discord between Turkey and Israel.

Click image to view network of Turkey and Israel relations

We’ve seen recent challenges over offshore drilling territory come and go (see the dispute over oil deposits in the South China Sea), but this will certainly be an issue to watch as the Israel’s relations with Arab countries remain as stormy as ever. Additionally, we’re provided the opportunity to watch how this develops as projections show Israel’s Mari-B gas field is expected to depleted by 2013 and drilling in the Leviathan field could begin as early as 2016.

Visit Recorded Future and get registered for a trial account to try out the timeline and network tools shown above and run your own analysis on these and other geopolitical issues.

Recorded Future is hosting three intelligence-focused webcasts that will range in subject matter from monitoring current and predicted social unrest by location to evaluating emerging cyber threats to the evolution and forecast influence of political organizations.

The schedule for this series is as follows:

Monitoring for Protests and Unrest
Date: Thursday, March 22 at 11AM EST
Registration: Sign up here!
Details: As unrest is increasingly organized online, corporate and government analysts are challenged with a rapidly evolving set of data to consider for location specific security. The webcast will include demonstration of a custom application built to monitor news and social media for signs of unrest, and we invite you to join us to see how our temporal analytic technology supports real-time protests monitoring and forecasts.

Open Source Intelligence for Cyber Defense
Date: Thursday, March 29 at 11AM EST
Registration: Sign up here!
Details: Corporate security teams and government agencies are faced with fast evolving cyber threats, and Recorded Future provides temporal analysis to help analysts find intelligence buried in big data. We’ll discuss a variety of scenarios including emerging threat analysis, evaluation and scoring of sources, and monitoring known threats.

What’s Next for the Muslim Brotherhood?
Date: Thursday, April 12 at 11AM EST
Registration: Sign up here!
Details: The focus will be a case study of the Muslim Brotherhood’s emerging role in the Egyptian government as well as predictive indicators in light of the upcoming presidential election. We’ll demonstrate how Recorded Future enables an efficient timeline and network analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascent since the January 25th revolution.

One task that we’ve heard to be challenging for analysts (business and intelligence alike) is capturing a snapshot of how the world appeared at a past time. This could be the PR from a company leading up to a past earnings announcement or the local news that precluded a major protest event. In this case, we’ll compare the diplomatic relations for China in months leading up to their leadership visiting the United States.

Here’s how to turn back the clock by setting limits on publication time in Recorded Future to evaluate a historical period:

• Chinese President Hu Jintao visited the US last year, arriving on January 18, 2011, which we’ll use as a reference point to evaluate his country’s diplomacy.
• You can use Recorded Future to set both event time (when an event took place) and content Publication Time to October 1, 2010 – Jan 17, 2011, then choose the event type “Diplomatic Relations”, and search for China.

The timeline below shows that diplomatic activity was relatively subdued leading up to Hu’s visit with the exception of meetings with the United States and Germany.

Diplomatic Activity for China in Lead Up to Hu's US Visit

The activity in the timeline can filtered down by the countries and officials with relationships to China, and we can actually gather up the most frequently co-occurring countries mentioned in these diplomatic relation events with China. Remember that these events occurred during the three months before Hu’s visit to the United States, and we find that after the US and Japan, the list is as follows:

Once we have an overview, we can compare that list to the network shown below of China’s relations for just the month prior to Hu’s trip. Interestingly, you’ll find that the most controversial relations from the US geopolitical perspective are absent. To view this yourself, click the network image and then use the time slider underneath to shift the frame in focus.

Diplomatic Relations Close to Hu Jintao's US Trip

All of this initial research builds into an opportunity to identify recurring themes or divergence from past behavior with respect to a current event. We can now contrast the above results with China’s diplomatic relations leading up to Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit to the US this past week.

Recent Xi Jinping US Visit Timeline - Click to View

The first thing that stands out looking at the timeline is the significant difference in China’s diplomatic activity leading up to Xi’s travel as well as the negative sentiment surrounding recent events. This stands in contrast to the generally positive sentiment in the month prior to Hu’s visit.

You can also take a step further and see that several of those controversial countries absent ahead of Hu’s 2011 visit are now very much in the picture (Syria, Iran, Sudan) leading up to the recent China-US meeting.

Network of Month Leading Up to Xi's Visit - Click to View

What’s to be learned? On the first take, we can pick up on the negative sentiment found in media surrounding China’s diplomatic relations during the recent months leading up to Xi Jinping’s visit to the US and the presence or mention of China’s relations with country’s at odds with the larger international community.

What’s still to be examined:

• Are there distinctions in the media coverage leading up to the separate visits made by Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao to other countries?
• Are there patterns to be found by mapping out the countries with whom China engages prior to visits by it’s officials to particular states or regions?

The stage is set for answering those types of questions now that we’ve gone about segmenting media coverage based on both event time (when something happened) and publication time (when those events were reported). If this type of analysis would be valuable to your organization, go ahead and try Recorded Future or contact us for more information.

[Excerpt from "Criminals, Hacktivists, and Nation States"originally posted on Adriana Dvorsak's New Solutions blog hosted at Euractiv. Thanks to Adriana for permitting us to share her work here on Analysis Intelligence.]

…these individuals are not susceptible to international law, for example to Geneva conventions which professional soldiers must follow. In addition these individuals are not familiar with military ethics, laws of neutrality, might not have clear intent, do not follow the rules of hierarchical organization. Individuals can be persecuted under national criminal law, therefore we can understand police pushing for change in criminal law to cover more cyber security threats.

Recent Hacktivist Actors and Targets

You may easily manipulate Recorded Future application to get data on longer time line, on different type of events or look at them in a neat interactive Google Earth view. I came across different actors, for example hacktivists, patriot hackers, online activists, organized cyber crime, terrorist organizations, and other autonomous actors and it seems to me that individuals became very important for cyber security. Diverse as they are, they can not be called a military and they will hardly take part in a classical armed conflict where one military confronts another. But they are so important that militaries hire them and even offer them to NATO as national cyber troops. Well, Romanian hacktivists apparently disagreed with such a side job.

The post can be read in full at Euractiv.