IED Trends: Turning Tennis Balls Into Bombs

Terrorists are relentlessly evolving tactics and techniques for IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), and analyzing reporting on IEDs can provide insight complementary to HUMINT on emerging militant methods. Preparing for an upcoming webcast with our friends at Terrogence, we found incidents using sports balls, particularly tennis balls and cricket balls, more frequently appearing as a delivery vehicle for explosives.

When we break these incidents from the last four months down by location, the city of Karachi in southern Pakistan stands out as  a hotbed. There is also evidence that this tactic is being embraced around the globe as you can see sports balls fashioned into bombs found from Longview, Washington in the United States to Varanasi in India.

We can use Recorded Future’s Web Intelligence platform to plot out the locations where incidents have recently occurred as well as the frequency and timing.

Join us next week to hear an in-depth discussion on analyst methodology for combining broad web-scale OSINT and deep vertical intelligence with OSINT and Virtual HUMINT.

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We recently hosted a webcast on this subject together with Terrogence, which generated great interest and attendance. A recording of this webcast is available.