Read This Before You Choose a Protective Intelligence Solution

Choosing a protective intelligence solution is a high-stakes decision. The wrong platform creates a false sense of security — generating pretty dashboards while missing the threats that actually matter. The right one provides early warning your team wouldn’t have otherwise.

Here are the five questions that separate the two. Most vendors hope you don’t ask them.

Question 1: What Exactly Do You Monitor?

“Social media and the dark web” is marketing language, not an answer. Get specific.

How many social media platforms? Which ones? Does coverage include Telegram, Discord, Mastodon, and Bluesky — where coordination and threat activity increasingly occur? Or just Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn?

What dark web sources? A few major forums, or hundreds of forums, marketplaces, paste sites, and chat channels? Do they cover non-English dark web sources?

What about data broker sites, credential breach databases, domain registrations, and web page monitoring? Each of these represents a distinct data layer that contributes to a complete protection picture.

The platform that monitors 750+ social platforms has a fundamentally different coverage posture than one monitoring 50. Ask for the number. Ask for the list.

Question 2: How Do You Classify Threats?

Keyword matching is not classification. Sentiment analysis is not classification. Both are tools within a classification framework, but they’re insufficient on their own.

Ask to see the threat taxonomy — the specific categories, domains, and scenarios the platform detects. A platform that classifies against 225+ specific threat scenarios across 14 risk domains provides qualitatively different intelligence than one that classifies “positive,” “negative,” or “threat.”

If the vendor can’t show you a published taxonomy, they’re likely operating with generic classification that can’t distinguish between a customer complaint and a credible threat.

Question 3: Who Owns the Collection Infrastructure?

This question reveals the platform’s architectural foundation.

First-party collection means the vendor operates its own crawlers, API integrations, and monitoring agents — gathering data directly from source platforms. The vendor controls freshness, coverage, and quality.

Third-party collection means the vendor purchases data from aggregators and applies their analysis layer on top. They don’t control what’s collected, how fresh it is, or how complete the coverage is.

The practical difference: first-party collectors can add new platforms when threats migrate. Third-party dependents wait for their supplier to add coverage — which may or may not happen on your timeline.

Question 4: What Happens After Detection?

Detection without workflow is just notification. A platform that alerts you to a threat but provides no tools for investigation, evidence collection, or response management is a monitoring service, not a protection system.

Evaluate whether the platform supports investigation tools for rapid context gathering around detected threats, evidence preservation and archival for legal or law enforcement use, case management for tracking threats through assessment and resolution, and integration with your existing security workflow (SIEM, ticketing, communication tools).

The post-detection workflow determines whether alerts turn into action or sit in a queue.

Question 5: What’s the Pricing Model?

Per-seat pricing penalizes collaboration. If adding your threat assessment team, your executive protection officers, and your regional security managers to the platform increases the cost, the pricing model discourages the broad access that makes intelligence useful.

Entity-based pricing scales with your protection scope, not your team size. You pay for what you monitor — the people, brands, and assets under protection — not for who looks at the dashboard.

Understand what drives cost, what’s included versus add-on, and what happens to pricing when you need to add five more protected executives after a board expansion.

DigitalStakeout answers all five questions transparently. Published taxonomy. 750+ monitored platforms. First-party collection. Investigation and archival tools. Entity-based pricing starting at $499/month.

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Evaluate DigitalStakeout. See our taxonomy, view pricing, or get a demo.