---
title: Did Competitive Intelligence
description: ""
lang: en
date: 2008-09-01T12:00:00.000Z
tags: []
---

**small outlet** · “Analyst”

for 11 months in late 2000s

## What I did

- Surveillance and corroboration
- Penetration testing
- Research and analytics
- Deception and exploiting trust
- Background checks on slow days

## What I achieved

- Had seven different personas with perfectly crafted legends and almost kept my sanity
- Found a mole in a client’s sales department and brought him to justice
- Investigated a couple of embezzlements
- Gained 4 kg watching people do nothing exciting
- Sorted a lot of garbage

## What I learned

- How to think like a bad guy: seeing liabilities, opportunities, attack vectors and how to counter them
- How to do open-source intelligence (OSINT), gather/hoard and analyze information
- How deeply unprotected we all are on a physical level, and how often we focus on cybersecurity and forget that concierges can be bribed
- You always have to say “competitive intelligence” instead of “corporate espionage” for legal reasons

## Skills

Intelligence, [Application Security](/skill/application-security/)