Crimewall Product Updates, Q4 2024

While 2025 is underway, we still have some unfinished business with 2024—we want to let you all know about everything we brought to SL Crimewall in the final quarter of last year. 

The run-up to New Year was a remarkably productive period with entirely new major features being introduced to the solution, as well as a plethora of minor improvements being made. Let’s take a look… 

OSINT Start

In many ways, this is more than a feature—it’s an additional iteration of the entire product UI. OSINT Start allows users to channel the huge extraction and analysis power of the product’s functionality via a simplified interface, providing the ultimate in user-friendly, quick, and wide-ranging research and investigation.

Switching between the full product UI (Pro) and OSINT Start is as simple as clicking a toggle button in the top of the interface window. Once enabled, the new mode delivers operability that is stripped back to the very bare essentials—a single search field for launching a quick-start search from entering essential inputs: an email address, a phone number, or username.

Despite the simplicity of the new UI mode, there is no compromise in the quality of results delivered—the system retains the vast power of the full SL Crimewall solution, providing the same next-level results, spanning social media, messengers, corporate sources, the Dark Web, and more—but in a no-fuss, easily exportable format.

This less-is-more reimagining of the tool allows you to: 

• Get neatly organized, wide-ranging results in seconds
• Search from single inputs: email, phone number, or username
• Switch between Start and Pro (full version) in one click
• Bypass project set-ups
• Export findings in an instant
• And more

For more information on OSINT Start, see our dedicated blog post.

Focus Mode

When working with an extensive and complex graph, you may want to manipulate and unpack objects connected to just one particular region without disrupting the overall structure you’ve established. For this purpose, we’ve introduced Focus Mode—a totally new feature exclusive to Crimewall, that allows users to focus in on a given area of the graph. 

To apply Focus Mode, simply highlight the area of the graph that you wish to develop then select the focus icon in the toolbar above. You’ll now have an isolated section of the graph (objects from the wider graph will be “muted”) where you can rearrange the layout, move objects, launch methods, and generally elaborate this pertinent area of your investigation. 

This feature has a wide utility, and can give the user much greater control and clarity in performing a number of important actions, such as: 

• Looking inside a given group
• Locating a particular set of objects 
• Zooming in to and analyzing a specific selection of objects

For a visual guide on how to apply this feature, check out the video on our YouTube channel.

Timeline

Chronology is often a crucial parameter in making sense of a case or situation. And the all-new Timeline feature in Crimewall allows you to gain a clear picture of events and data by  temporally ordering objects such as social media profiles, comments, tags, check-ins and so on. All objects on the graph that contain a date will automatically be added to the timeline, which can be viewed under the graph—there’s a toggle to view or hide it. 

While this feature has a wide range of use cases, a key approach that Timeline makes possible is that of chronolocation—leveraging temporal intersections to quickly hone in on your target area of investigation. 

Let’s say you have three subjects and you want to look into their joint activities. With Timeline, you can see at a glance when the activity between all three parties was most dense, and exclusively focus on those interactions, instead of trawling through hundreds of data points before you find something relevant.

Chronolocation can also be extremely useful in analyzing broader informational pictures. The graph below shows X posts relating to Bitcoin, for which the timeline indicates a major spike in activity on November 5, 2024. With sentiment analysis revealing that over 93% of the comments are positive or neutral, the inference is plain—the presidential election of Donald Trump ignited a wave of optimism in the cryptocurrency.

Our Center of Excellence has spent some time with this feature and put it to great use—you can read about some of their successful applications here.

Improved Object Grouping 

Having previously added the feature allowing users to extract objects from a group just using the Navigation tab, we have now extended this function, meaning you can now add objects to a given group (or move objects from one group to another) in the same way.

To clarify, this works very intuitively—you simply drag and drop the objects you need to move from within the Navigation tab, just as you would move files in your hard disk directories, and the changes will be reflected in the graph. It’s a great UX time-saver, as you no longer need to go through the rigmarole of ungrouping and regrouping to get the object configurations you want.

Hierarchical Graph Layout

While the Crimewall functionality already offers an extensive palette of graph layouts, we’ve added another which we think we’ll be very very useful to a number of users—Hierarchical Layout. When enabled, this organizes the graph in a “waterfall” arrangement, with outputs falling into a row beneath their respective inputs.

UX/UI Improvements

• Links Copied to Separate Projects. When copying graph elements to either a new or existing project, they now paste with the links included.
• Interactive User Guide. If you have a query regarding the Crimewall functionality, you can now jump directly to the information you need from within the UI. Simply click the question mark icon in the top right corner of the window, and go to “User Guide” in the dropdown menu.
• Method Indicators. You can now view applied methods on the graph in Collaborative mode. This was previously only available in Single User Mode.
• Design Updates. Two UI elements have received a design refresh: the Methods tab (plus new methods sub-panel and monitoring launch button), and the Toolbar. Report notification emails have also had a makeover. 
• Sentiment Analysis. Results are now displayed in a more logical and intuitive fashion. 

Performance and Stability

• Bugs with the Run All Methods function have been resolved and the algorithm optimized for faster execution. It now runs more smoothly.
• The Tasks panel now loads faster.
• Automerge has been refactored for a more stable and fast execution.
• System bugs have been fixed in Multi-User Mode.
• Improved stability when working with groups.
• The graph blinking issue has been resolved.

And that wraps up our Crimewall product updates for the final quarter of 2024. Watch this space, as there’s some great things coming in 2025. We hope you try out the new features and appreciate the improvements—together they should make for a truly more convenient and productive investigation experience. Till next time!