At ObscureIQ, we’re rolling out ThreatWatch. It’s our new active threat monitoring service.
Looking for threats forces us to think differently. About how signals get buried. Hidden in places most people overlook. What looks like harmless chatter, a playful meme, or even a gaming mod can sometimes carry a very different meaning.
The new language of the internet isn’t words.
It’s signals hidden in posts, media, games, mods, playlists… even in the way people bend words to slip past filters.
👉 “Seggs.” “Unalive.” “Rice bunny.”
🔹Teens swapping emojis for censored topics…
🔹Activists masking protest calls inside memes…
🔹Extremists chatting covertly online games…
The hardest messages to intercept are the ones you don’t realize are messages at all.
We’ve always had secret handshakes.
Now those signals can live online in Final Fantasy XIV skins, Fortnite dance moves, and TikTok captions rewritten to dodge moderation.
Threats hide in such channels, but so do communities, jokes, and political movements.
Knowing how to spot the difference … that’s what real monitoring is about.
Spectrum of Covert Communication Channels
Axis: Playful – Activist – Malicious
🟢 Playful / Everyday
Motivation: Fun, identity, peer-group belonging
- Emoji codes (🍃 = weed, 🍕 = inside joke)
- Text mods & slang (“seggs,” “unalive,” “uwu,” “p3rc”)
- Gaming signals (jumping, skins, dance moves as cues)
- Alt accounts / Finstas (coded posts, symbolic content)
- Shared playlists (song titles swapped as private notes)
🟡 Activist / Protest / Political
Motivation: Safety, censorship evasion, coordination
- Emoji substitutions (🐟 for banned words in China, 🍎 for Apple Daily in Hong Kong)
- Creative spellings / homophones (“rice bunny” = #MeToo, “5k” = strike)
- Meme cover (altered memes, symbolic QR codes with protest links)
- Profile pic overlays (colors, symbols to silently identify members)
- Denial-of-signal tactics (K-pop fancams spamming police hashtags)
🔴 Malicious / Threat Actor
Motivation: Evasion, recruitment, covert ops
- Extremist groups have been documented experimenting with in-game chat as covert channels for communication.
- Mod-based signaling (custom avatars/skins carrying hidden meaning).
- Coded language shifts (deliberate misspellings to evade moderation).
- Steganography in media (hidden text or payloads in images/video).
- Criminal trade in gaming chats (credentials, stolen goods, malware delivery).
ThreatWatch isn’t listening in on private game chat or decoding avatar skins. What it does is surface the same kinds of hidden signals when they appear in posts, media, forums, and open channels – – the places where risk truly overlaps with our clients’ exposure.
ObscureIQ Insight
- Common thread: repurposing normal systems as hidden channels.
- Language is just as powerful as visuals From emoji to modded spellings, signals evolve to evade detection.
- Security takeaway: it’s not always about what’s said. Sometimes the real message is how it’s encoded.
