DigitalStakeout Blog
Threat intelligence analysis, OSINT methodology, industry news, and product updates from the DigitalStakeout team.
RSS FeedAI Will Not Be 'Watching Everything' in Security
Security AI isn't about analyzing everything. It's about knowing what to ignore. Why the all-seeing AI myth is the most dangerous assumption in security today.
Skynet Isn't Here. But the First Machine-Native Social Network Is
Moltbook is a preview of a future where autonomous systems coordinate without human oversight. Why knowledge graphs are becoming essential infrastructure.
Why Your Best Intel Analyst Leaving Hurts So Much
Why does losing one analyst set an entire team back months? Because the insight lived in their head, not in your systems. Here's how to change that.
What Is Digital Risk Protection? The Complete Guide
Digital risk protection monitors the surface, deep, and dark web for threats to your brand, people, and assets. How DRP works and how to evaluate platforms.
Real-Time Alerting for Security Operations: Email, Webhook, and API
How DigitalStakeout delivers classified threat alerts via email, webhook, and API — with anti-fatigue logic that ensures analysts see threats, not noise.
Meltwater vs DigitalStakeout: Why Marketing Tools Aren't Security Tools
Meltwater is a media monitoring platform for PR teams. DigitalStakeout is a threat intelligence platform for security teams. Using the wrong one has consequences.
OSINT for Law Enforcement: Balancing Investigation Power with Civil Liberties
OSINT gives law enforcement powerful investigation capabilities. Using them responsibly requires understanding the legal and ethical boundaries.
The 2026 DRP Market: Who's Left After the Acquisitions
The digital risk protection market has consolidated dramatically. Here's who got acquired, who's still independent, and what it means for security buyers.
Geopolitical Risk Monitoring: How OSINT Keeps Multinationals Ahead of Global Disruption
Geopolitical events move faster than analyst reports. Here's how OSINT monitoring gives multinational organizations real-time awareness of risks affecting operations and personnel.
Brand Impersonation Detection: Finding Fake Profiles Before They Find Your Customers
Brand impersonation enables phishing, fraud, and reputation damage. Here's how to detect fake profiles, domains, and apps using your brand.
Domain Monitoring for Brand Protection: Catching Typosquats, Look-Alikes, and Phishing Infrastructure
Typosquat and look-alike domains enable phishing, credential harvesting, and brand fraud. Here's how domain monitoring detects them before damage occurs.
Samdesk vs DigitalStakeout: Event Detection vs Entity Protection
Samdesk provides AI-powered global event detection. DigitalStakeout provides entity-specific threat intelligence. Here's when each is the right choice.
Social Media Crisis Monitoring: What Your Team Needs When Everything Goes Wrong
When a crisis hits, social media becomes both the information source and the attack surface. Here's what crisis-ready monitoring looks like.
What 'First-Party Collection' Means and Why Your Threat Intelligence Depends on It
First-party collection means the platform gathers data directly from sources. The alternative — reselling third-party feeds — creates latency, gaps, and quality problems.
Cobwebs Technologies vs DigitalStakeout: Two Models for Security OSINT
Cobwebs Technologies and DigitalStakeout serve different OSINT operational models. Here's how they compare for law enforcement and corporate security.
People Search for OSINT Investigations: Beyond the Basic Name Lookup
Effective people search for investigations goes beyond name lookups. Here's how OSINT analysts build comprehensive subject profiles from public data.
How to Evaluate a DRP Vendor: The 2026 Buyer's Checklist
A practical checklist for evaluating digital risk protection vendors — covering data sources, AI capabilities, pricing models, and vendor stability.
ShadowDragon vs DigitalStakeout: Investigation Tools vs Continuous Monitoring Platform
ShadowDragon specializes in OSINT investigation tools. DigitalStakeout provides continuous threat monitoring. Here's how to decide which model fits.
The True Cost of Threat Intelligence: What Doesn't Show Up on the Invoice
Subscription price is the smallest part of your threat intelligence cost. Implementation, analyst time, integration, and vendor management add up fast.
Protecting Critical Infrastructure with Open Source Intelligence
Critical infrastructure operators face threats from nation-states to domestic extremists. OSINT monitoring provides the early warning layer that physical security alone can't.
What Is Extended Threat Intelligence (XTI)?
Extended threat intelligence expands beyond cyber-only feeds to cover physical, reputational, and societal risks in a unified framework. Here's what XTI means in practice.
OSINT Investigation Workflow: From First Query to Continuous Monitoring
A practical OSINT investigation workflow — from scoping through collection, analysis, and reporting to continuous monitoring for ongoing threats.
Narrative Monitoring: Detecting Disinformation Campaigns Before They Damage Your Brand
Coordinated disinformation campaigns target corporations with fabricated narratives. Narrative monitoring detects them by tracking how false claims emerge, spread, and amplify.
How AI Classification Reduces False Positives and Gives Analysts Their Time Back
DigitalStakeout's AI engine uses 225+ threat classifiers across 14 risk domains to reduce alert noise — so analysts investigate threats, not false positives.
Dark Web vs Deep Web vs Surface Web: What Security Teams Should Actually Monitor
The three layers of the web serve different purposes for security monitoring. Here's what each contains, what's worth monitoring, and where to spend your budget.
The 14 Risk Domains Every Corporate Security Team Should Monitor
Most threat intelligence covers 2-3 risk domains. Comprehensive corporate security requires 14. Here's what each one covers and why the gaps matter.
What Is Entity Extraction? How AI Turns Unstructured Data Into Actionable Intelligence
Entity extraction identifies people, organizations, locations, and other specific entities in unstructured text — the foundation of automated threat intelligence.
Babel Street vs DigitalStakeout: Government-Grade vs Accessible Threat Intelligence
Babel Street serves government intelligence agencies with identity resolution and multilingual NLP. DigitalStakeout serves corporate security with accessible, transparent pricing. Here's the comparison.
How a Corporate Security Team Replaced 4 Vendors with One Platform
An anonymized case study of a corporate security team consolidating social media monitoring, dark web intelligence, brand protection, and executive protection into DigitalStakeout.
Credential Monitoring 101: What Happens When Employee Passwords Leak
Employee credentials appear in breach databases daily. Here's the attack chain, why speed matters, and how continuous monitoring closes the gap.
Continuous Vetting with OSINT: A Guide for Government Security Teams
How government agencies use OSINT for continuous vetting — moving beyond periodic reinvestigation to ongoing insider threat detection.
Why Family Offices Need Digital Risk Protection
UHNW families face targeted digital threats that financial risk management doesn't address. Here's why digital risk protection is becoming standard for family offices.
OSINT for Healthcare Security: Monitoring External Threats to Hospitals and Health Systems
Healthcare facilities face unique external threats from patient grievances to targeted violence. Here's how OSINT monitoring addresses healthcare-specific risks.
Boolean Search for OSINT Investigations: A Practitioner's Guide
Effective Boolean queries are the foundation of OSINT investigation. Here's how to build precise searches across social media, web, and dark web sources.
Threat Monitoring for Universities: Detecting Campus Safety Risks Before They Escalate
Universities face unique security challenges from open campuses to student mental health crises. Here's how OSINT monitoring supports campus safety programs.
Digital Shadows Got Acquired by ReliaQuest: What DRP Buyers Need to Know
ReliaQuest acquired Digital Shadows in 2022. Here's what changed for customers, what it means for the DRP market, and how buyers should respond.
The OSINT Tool Stack Is Dead: Why Platforms Replace Browser Tabs
The era of assembling OSINT workflows from 15 browser tabs and free tools is ending. Integrated platforms are replacing the tool stack for operational security teams.
What Is SOCMINT? Social Media Intelligence for Security Operations
SOCMINT applies intelligence methodologies to social media data for security purposes. Here's how it works, how it differs from social listening, and what it requires.
Building a Geo-Fenced Monitoring Feed for Event Security
Step-by-step guide to setting up geo-fenced social media monitoring for events — from defining fence boundaries to integrating with security operations.
How Security Firms Scale Client Monitoring with Multi-Tenant OSINT
Multi-tenant OSINT platforms let security firms monitor dozens of clients from a single interface. Here's the architecture, the workflow, and the business model.
Recorded Future vs DigitalStakeout: When Cyber-Only Threat Intelligence Isn't Enough
Recorded Future dominates cyber threat intelligence but doesn't cover physical security, executive protection, or social media threats. Here's where the comparison shifts.
What Is a Social Media Threat?
A social media threat is any online post, message, or activity that indicates potential harm to people, organizations, or assets. Here's what security teams need to know.
What Is Threat Leakage? Detecting Violence Indicators Online
Threat leakage is when individuals reveal violent intentions online before acting. How security teams detect these signals using OSINT monitoring.
Dataminr vs DigitalStakeout: Real-Time Threat Intel at a Fraction of the Cost
A structural comparison of Dataminr and DigitalStakeout for security teams evaluating real-time threat intelligence platforms.
OSINT for Executive Protection: What Security Teams Need to Know
How executive protection teams use OSINT to identify digital threats, monitor exposure, and protect principals in the online environment.
Social Media Threat Monitoring for Corporate Security
How corporate security teams use social media monitoring to detect physical threats, executive targeting, and brand attacks before they escalate.
ZeroFox After the PE Acquisition: What Changed for Buyers
Haveli Investments acquired ZeroFox for $350M in 2024. What changed for customers and what buyers evaluating alternatives should know.
How to Build a Dark Web Monitoring Program from Scratch
A practical guide to building a dark web monitoring program — from defining scope to selecting platforms and operationalizing alerts.
Beyond the AI Hype: What Real Threat Detection Actually Looks Like
A reality check on social media threat detection from the team at DigitalStakeout. What works, what doesn't, and what the industry gets wrong.
5 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a DRP Platform
Five questions every security buyer should ask when evaluating digital risk protection platforms — from data sources to pricing models to vendor independence.
Entity-Based Pricing vs. Per-Seat Licensing: Why It Matters
Why entity-based pricing for threat intelligence platforms scales better than per-seat licensing — and what it means for security budgets.
Securitas Acquires Liferaft: What OSINT Buyers Should Know
Securitas signed a binding agreement to acquire Liferaft. What the acquisition means for OSINT platform buyers evaluating alternatives.
Understanding the Evolving Threat Landscape for High-Profile Sports Organizations
A critical analysis of modern security challenges facing sports organizations, following the Manhattan active shooter incident targeting NFL headquarters.
Digital Brand Protection: A Security Team's Guide to Detecting Brand Abuse
Brand protection isn't just a marketing problem. Here's how security teams detect impersonation, counterfeit activity, and brand abuse across digital platforms.
Read This Before You Choose a Protective Intelligence Solution
A buyer's guide to evaluating protective intelligence platforms. The five questions vendors don't want you to ask — and what the answers reveal.
AI for Executive Risk: Bridging Physical and Cyber Threat Intelligence
Executives face threats that span physical and cyber domains. AI-powered classification across both is the only way to see the complete picture.
AI-Powered Threat Detection: Why Guessing Threat Terms Is Obsolete
Keyword-based threat monitoring forces analysts to predict how threats will be expressed. AI classification eliminates the guessing game entirely.
How Security Service Firms Use OSINT to Scale Client Coverage Without Scaling Headcount
Security service firms that integrate OSINT platforms can monitor more clients at higher quality without proportionally increasing analyst headcount.
Automating Google Dorking: From Manual OSINT Technique to Continuous Monitoring
Google dorking is powerful for one-off OSINT research. Here's how to automate it for continuous exposure monitoring — and where platforms take over.
DigitalStakeout Now Monitors the Bluesky Firehose
DigitalStakeout adds full Bluesky firehose monitoring with AI classification — closing a growing coverage gap in social media threat detection.
The External Threats Your Organization Is Probably Not Monitoring
Most organizations monitor for cyber threats but miss the broader external threat landscape. Here are the categories that fall through the cracks.
How to Get Harmful Content Taken Down from the Internet
A practical guide to content removal: platform reporting, DMCA, legal takedowns, and right to be forgotten. What works, what doesn't, and what to do after removal.
Continuous Data Breach Monitoring: Why Checking Once Isn't Enough
New credential breaches surface daily. Continuous monitoring detects compromised employee credentials before attackers use them.
Continuous Vetting: Using Social Media for Cleared Personnel Monitoring
How continuous vetting programs use social media monitoring for cleared personnel — the capabilities, the legal boundaries, and the operational considerations.
Marketing vs. Reality: Debunking Digital Executive Protection Claims
The digital executive protection market is full of inflated claims. Here's how to see through the marketing and evaluate what actually works.
Deepfake Impersonation: The Escalating Threat to Executive Leadership
Deepfake technology enables executive impersonation at scale — from $25M fraud schemes to reputation destruction. Here's the threat and how to detect it.
Digital Footprints: Watch Your Step
Your digital footprint is larger than you think. Here's what it exposes, who's looking, and what security teams can do about it.
Why Executives Should Use a Digital Footprint Removal Service — And Why It's Not Enough
Executive digital footprint removal reduces attack surface but doesn't eliminate risk. Here's what works, what doesn't, and what comes next.
Introducing the Known Exploited CVE Feed: Cyber Intelligence That Prioritizes What's Actually Being Attacked
DigitalStakeout's CVE Feed surfaces actively exploited vulnerabilities from OSINT sources — not just disclosed CVEs, but the ones attackers are using right now.
Introducing Profile Tracker, People Search, and the Archiver Extension
Three new tools for OSINT practitioners — continuous profile monitoring, comprehensive people search, and browser-based evidence archival.
Introducing the Risk Event Monitor: Your Window to Global Risk Intelligence
DigitalStakeout's Risk Event Monitor provides real-time tracking of global events across natural disasters, civil unrest, terrorism, and infrastructure disruption.
Platform Update: Mastodon Monitoring Across the Fediverse
DigitalStakeout adds Mastodon monitoring across the Fediverse, extending threat detection to decentralized social media platforms.
Online Privacy Training for Executive Protection: What to Cover and Why
Executive protection starts with privacy awareness. Here's a framework for training high-profile individuals to manage their digital exposure.
A Practitioner's Guide to OSINT Investigation Using DigitalStakeout
A walkthrough of DigitalStakeout's OSINT investigation tools — what each does, when to use it, and how they work together in real investigations.
Using OSINT Defensively: How Open Source Intelligence Protects Your Privacy
The same OSINT techniques used by threat actors can be used defensively to assess and protect your organization's online privacy. Here's how.
Unified OSINT for External Threats: Why Fragmented Tools Fail Security Teams
Fragmented OSINT tools create intelligence gaps. Here's why unified platforms outperform disconnected toolkits for external threat detection.
AI Agent-Powered Threat Intelligence vs. Traditional Managed Services
AI agents handle classification, routing, and volume. Humans handle judgment. Here's how agent-powered intelligence compares to traditional managed services — and why the hybrid wins.
Why Your PII Removal Service Is Failing You
PII removal services market big numbers but deliver less than half the time. Here's why the numbers game is a dangerous illusion for executive protection.
Threat Advisory: Monitoring 'No Kings Day' Protest Activity
How OSINT monitoring tracked the emergence, coordination, and execution of 'No Kings Day' protest activity across social media and messaging platforms.
Beyond Keyword Matching: Using Sentiment Analysis to Anticipate Physical and Cyber Threats
Sentiment analysis detects emotional escalation in online content before explicit threats emerge — giving security teams an earlier warning window.
Beyond Basic Data Broker Removal: Achieving True Operational Security for High-Profile Individuals
Data broker removal is the starting point, not the finish line. Here's what true operational security looks like for executives and high-profile individuals.
The UnitedHealthcare Tragedy: What Corporate Security Must Learn
The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson exposed critical gaps in how corporate America approaches executive protection. These are the lessons.
Election 2024 Security Monitoring: How Security Teams Tracked Threats Across Social Media
The 2024 US election cycle generated unprecedented volume of online threats. Here's how security teams used OSINT monitoring to stay ahead.
Tracking the Paris 2024 Olympics Sabotage: What Real-Time OSINT Revealed
When coordinated sabotage attacks hit French rail infrastructure during the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony, OSINT monitoring detected it within minutes.
OSINT for Event Security: What Advance Teams Need Before Boots Hit the Ground
Security advance teams can use OSINT to assess threats, map the environment, and prepare for events before arriving on-site. Here's the operational framework.
Social Media Threat Assessment: A Guide for Security Professionals
How security professionals assess threats from social media — from identifying indicators to evaluating credibility and determining response.
Practical Social Media Security: What Actually Reduces Your Risk
Most social media security advice is generic. Here are the specific steps that actually reduce organizational and personal risk on social platforms.
The Topics on Social Media That Actually Threaten Safety, Society, and Trust
Not all harmful social media content is obvious. These are the topic categories that actually threaten organizational and public safety.
Private Search: Why Your OSINT Research Needs an Ad-Free, Secure Search Engine
Standard search engines track queries, personalize results, and leak your research intent. Here's why OSINT professionals need private search.
OSINT Alert: BlastPass Zero-Click Exploit Targeting Apple Devices
Critical advisory on the BlastPass zero-click exploit chain targeting iPhones and iPads. What security teams need to know and do immediately.
Permanent Exposure: How Blockchain Changes Reputation Management Forever
Blockchain-based content platforms make reputation attacks permanent and irremovable. What security and risk teams need to understand.
Tracking the France Riots: How Telegram Became the Coordination Layer
During the 2023 French riots, Telegram channels became the primary coordination tool. Here's what OSINT monitoring revealed in real time.
Twitter's Rate Limits and Scraping Restrictions: What It Means for OSINT
Elon Musk's rate limits and anti-scraping measures on Twitter/X disrupted OSINT collection. Here's what changed and how monitoring adapted.
How to Detect Fake Organization LinkedIn Profiles Before They Become Weapons
Fake LinkedIn profiles impersonating your executives and brand are weapons for phishing, social engineering, and fraud. Here's how to find them.
When Online Threats Become Real: The Supreme Court Stalking Case and Digital Threat Assessment
The Supreme Court's ruling on online threats raised critical questions about when social media posts cross the line — and how security teams should assess them.
Real-Time OSINT: Tracking the Wagner Insurrection as It Unfolded
When the Wagner Group marched on Moscow, OSINT monitoring provided real-time intelligence faster than any government briefing. Here's what we saw.
OPSEC Advisory: Minnesota State People Search Exposes Personal Information at Scale
Minnesota's public records search tools expose personal information that creates real security risks. What security teams need to know and do.
Threat Advisory: KillNet Targets Banking Transfer Systems — SEPA, SWIFT, and Wise
KillNet announced attacks on Western banking transfer systems including SEPA, SWIFT, and Wise. What financial institutions and security teams should know.
Tracking Breaking News Through Social Media: What Security Teams Need to Know
Social media breaks news faster than traditional media. Here's how security teams use real-time social monitoring for situational awareness.