Event Safety and Venue Protection with OSINT Solutions
“If you are in the [Major City] arena please be careful! This guy is making claims of a mass shooting!”
— Actual social media post
If you’re an event venue’s chief security officer, security manager, or security director, wouldn’t you want to know about this post?
The threat to large events, and the venues that house them, is all too real.
In April 2013, two brothers planted homemade bombs, hidden in backpacks, near the finish line of the 117th annual Boston Marathon. The bombing, motivated by United States involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, killed three people. Hundreds more were injured, including 17 people who lost limbs.[1] It was the first instance of a terrorist attack at a sporting event held on United States soil.[2] Four years later, an extremist Islamic suicide bomber murdered 22 people and injured more than 1,000 in England’s Manchester Arena, immediately following a pop concert.[3] At a 2024 campaign rally, a 20-year-old gunman wielding a semiautomatic rifle fired eight shots at then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.[4] Later, law enforcement searching the gunman’s van found explosives and a detonator.[5]
These attacks vanquished the belief that event protection and venue protection should consist of nothing more than bag checks, pat downs, and strolls through metal detectors. Instead, security processes must quickly adapt to meet evolving threats. Development of holistic security plans can help in this effort.
Risk intelligence solutions are vital components of holistic security plans. These AI-powered data analytics systems search, collate, and analyze massive amounts of publicly available and commercially available information (PAI/CAI). Insight gleaned from these processes is called open-source intelligence (OSINT). OSINT helps investigators better spot threats and identify the people making those threats.
Use of OSINT is already considered a best practice for event and venue security. Its use has even become law in some regions. In 2025, the United Kingdom passed the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act.[6] The Act, also referred to as “Martyn’s Law,” applies to venues where 200 or more people are likely to gather. These venues include museums, shopping malls, nightclubs, amusement parks, movie theaters, concert halls, stadiums, conference centers, and other spots. The Protection of Premises Act requires those responsible for securing these types of locations to implement more stringent measures to mitigate the threat of terrorist attacks.
Let’s take a closer look at holistic security plans and the importance of a risk intelligence platform.
Protecting crowds from serious threats and security risks
To protect patrons and improve venue safety and security, security professionals should develop a holistic program consisting of:
Risk assessments
Security leaders should conduct risk assessments identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities — considering factors such as crowd size, venue layout, and any history of past incidents. These assessments pinpoint security gaps and ways to overcome them. The political environment — and the role a venue or event may play in it — must also be considered.
What does this mean? Imagine that two 1,000-person events are planned for a mid-size city. One is the state caucus of a major political party. The second is a performance of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The caucus is more likely to attract political extremists than the concert.
Learn the basics
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Using intelligence solutions for situational awareness
Identity risk intelligence and strategic threat intelligence empower security professionals to monitor social media, online forums, and news outlets for indications of planned attacks or disruptive behavior targeting specific events or venues.
Take mass shooters as an example. We know that these criminals tend to announce their intentions online.[7] Before murdering 10 Black people at a Tops Friendly supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y, the white supremacist shooter announced his plans in an online journal.[8] Before killing 23 people at a Texas Walmart in 2019, the murderer declared his intentions in a manifesto posted to social media.[9] Mass shooters even interact with social media during commission of their crimes. In 2019, a gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand, murdered 50 people as they prayed in their mosques. He wore a head-mounted camera to live-stream the shootings, pausing at times to narrate the horrors.[10]
These posts are blunt, unmistakable in their intent. AI-powered intelligence systems can detect them. But these systems can also help venue security personnel find more subtle indications of the potential for violence. Online, a forger may advertise fake credentials for sale, such as those that give legitimate staff backstage access. Certainly, those interested in buying these credentials may be over-zealous fans intent on meeting their musical idols. They may also be criminals who’d like the notoriety of murdering an entertainer, or terrorists seeking the ability to place bombs near building supports for maximum carnage.
Mass casualties are every venue’s worst fear. However, identity risk intelligence and strategic threat intelligence solutions can also help spot and stop lesser crimes. For example, they can help security teams detect ticket scalpers. They can also help find people offering counterfeit tickets, selling counterfeit merchandise, or using a large event as an opportunity to sell drugs.
Intelligence solutions also improve safety through:
Finding the right OSINT solution
A number of identity risk intelligence and strategic threat intelligence solutions are now on the market. How do you find the ones that best suit your needs?
For venue and event protection, security leaders should look for solutions that scan a huge variety of PAI/CAI; that enable smarter searches; and that provide AI-enabled semantic understanding of social media to look beyond the words used to the intent of those words.
Sources scanned should include both established and emerging social media sites; not just mainstream message boards, but niche, often distasteful boards. They should examine sites that host varying types of media, including video sites and streaming communities. Along with reputable news sources, your systems should search blogs and similar sites.
Smarter searching makes sure you find the information you need from the sources examined. Two capabilities to look for are translation capabilities and always-on monitoring.
All the data in the world does security professionals no good if they can’t understand the language in which it is written. Therefore, your intelligence solution must be capable of finding information published in a broad variety of languages, then translating it into your language of choice.
As mentioned above, threats aren’t always easy to spot. Certainly, the best identity risk intelligence and strategic threat intelligence solutions maintain lists of threat words to search. (Words such as “annihilate,” “bloodbath,” and “bleed out” tend not to appear in everyday updates.) But similar words and phrases can indicate very different intents. That’s why semantic understanding is so important. A comic posting, “I tore up The Club last night. Shout out to the audience for making it happen! 😊 😊 😊” is different from a disturbed individual posting “I’m going to shoot up The Club tonight. I can’t wait to hear the audience shout out🔫.”
Semantic understanding can also help organizations understand new representations of words. It can search for emojis meant to evoke violence: skulls, bombs, swords, and others. It can detect codes and symbols used to denote drug sales: “Aunt Hazel” is “heroin,” a snowflake emoji can represent cocaine. Finally, it can help detect coded hate speech — a significant benefit to venues hosting events geared toward populations that are often subjected to bigotry.
For the most up-to-date insight possible, always-on monitoring is vital. Your intelligence solutions should keep a search operation running regardless of whether someone is actively using it, appending newly found information to existing search terms and alerting when new insight is found.
How Babel Street can help
Babel Street identity risk intelligence and strategic threat intelligence solutions provide persistent searches of thousands of sources of PAI/CAI. To provide security professionals and law enforcement with the insight needed to secure venues and events, they scour data sources published in more than 200 languages and translate results into the user’s language of choice. Information sources include more than a billion top-level domains; commercially available sources; and real-world interactions generated on chats, social media posts, online comments, and message boards.
Our intelligence solutions further enhance security through searches of the dark web — or web sites that are inaccessible by standard search engines. Because the nature of the tools used to access the dark web ensure anonymity, it is a hotbed of illegal activity. Dark web search capabilities enable investigators to scan posts and other information they wouldn’t otherwise be able to see.
Situational awareness is a vital component of any holistic security program. Babel Street can help security professionals better analyze PAI, CAI, and dark web data for insights into the type of information that indicates potential criminal activity aimed at a venue or event. In doing so, these solutions help security teams better protect venues, patrons, and VIPs.
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Endnotes
1. Wikipedia, “Boston Marathon bombing,” accessed December 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing#:~:text=During%20questioning%2C%20Dzhokhar%20said%20that,was%20following%20his%20brother's%20lead.
2. Babel Street webinar, “From Physical to Digital Security: Take a Holistic Approach to Securing Your Venue,” accessed December 2025, https://www.babelstreet.com/landing/how-to-protect-your-event-before-it-starts
3. Wikipedia, “Manchester Arena bombing,” accessed December 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Arena_bombing
4. Levenson, Michael, “What We Know About the Assassination Attempt Against Trump,” The New York Times, July 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/14/us/politics/shooting-trump-rally.html
5. Eberhart, Chris, “Police comb through Thomas Matthew Crooks’ van that hid explosives, video shows,” Fox News, July 2024, https://www.foxnews.com/us/police-comb-through-thomas-matthew-crooks-van-hid-explosives-video-shows
6. The National Archives, “Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025,” accessed December 2025, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2025/10/contents
7. Peterson, J., Densley, J., Spaulding, J., & Higgins, S., “How Mass Public Shooters Use Social Media: Exploring Themes and Future Direction,” Social Media + Society, accessed December 2025, https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231155101
8. Suciu, Peter, “Social Media Increasingly Linked to Mass Shootings,” Forbes.com, May 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2022/05/25/social-media-increasingly-linked-with-mass-shootings/?sh=45b045aa3c73
9. Lee, Morgan and Weber, Paul J., “The Texas Shooter in a Racist Walmart Attack is Going to Prison: Here’s What You Need to Know About the Case,” Associated Press, July 2023, https://apnews.com/article/el-paso-walmart-texas-crusius-bf7d25f3567959ee8b121deabcf1d9a1
10. Wikipedia, “Christchurch mosque shootings,” accessed December 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mosque_shootings
Disclaimer:
All names, companies, and incidents portrayed in this document are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, companies, and products are intended or should be inferred.