As the National Football League gears up for Super Bowl LI in Houston on February 5, the team at Haystax Technology is preparing to provide security analytics support for what will be its eighth year of helping secure the NFL championship game and its associated pre-game events.

Seth Livingstone of the Fairfax County Economic Develop Authority (FCEDA) recently sat down with Haystax Technology’s Executive Vice President of Products, Chriss Knisley, to learn more about what’s typically done to secure a major public event like the Super Bowl. Knisley described the company’s ‘model-first’ approach to security analytics, and how using the threat model embedded in its Haystax Analytics Platform can analyze and prioritize various kinds of risk to help security teams and first responders maintain complete situational awareness and get ahead of their most serious threats.

“For an event like the Super Bowl, we create that model by talking to a diverse group of experts, not just the cops who look for threats every day,” Knisley told Livingstone. “We look for behavioral patterns that might shift, leading up to an attack. Plus, we look at all the data we can collect. That might be chatter on a dark-web site, stolen vehicles, stolen weapons. Each of these things are indicators that could be viewed as individual crimes or interesting facts on their own. But, as you start bringing those pieces together, you start influencing a belief network that says the likelihood of a terrorist attack is up or down.”

In addition to eight of the last nine Super Bowls, Haystax has helped secure other major events like the 2012 Republican National Convention, the Golden Globe awards and the Indianapolis 500. Haystax played a large role in Super Bowl 50 last year in Santa Clara, as the state of California is one of the company’s biggest clients.

Please click here to read the full article from FCEDA’s recent E-Bird newsletter.