About Us
Who We Are
Most similar private intelligence and security consultancy websites feature "About Us" sections with headshots and detailed biographies of their leadership, and, sometimes, of their individual consultants or a featured selection of their consultants. Black Core Security is different. We provide discreet services for organizations and high-profile individuals who value their privacy, and, in that same spirit, we value ours. At some point, it is possible that publicizing our identities on this website will allow us to provide better services to our clients, but until that point, we choose to remain anonymous.
However, we realize that reputation is an important factor in clients' decisions about whom to contract; the types of services we offer require a high degree of trust between client and consultant. We have no issues providing and proving our identities to serious potential clients, as well as references from past clients. Black Core Security's two principals started their careers in intelligence: one as an operations officer (core collector) in the CIA's Directorate of Operations and the other as a crisis management consultant working dependent evacuations, investigations, and kidnap and ransom response for a major international risk consultancy.
Our Differentiators
Black Core Security is the result of long-running dialogue between its principals about how to bring their combined skills in cybersecurity, privacy, surveillance, counter-surveillance, and intelligence to a broader set of clients than those private intelligence and security consultancies typically serve. We do serve traditional clients and activities: M&A due diligence, complex fraud investigations, deep vetting of key executives, shareholders, and political candidates, and security for high-profile individuals. But we also serve non-traditional clients who often cannot afford private intelligence services or do not have the contacts to successfully engage these services such as international NGOs operating in hostile or repressive environments.
We also differentiate ourselves by the consultants who work for us. Although our principals come from traditional intelligence and private security backgrounds, we tend to hire non-traditional consultants. We find that this is an important factor in our ability to successfully engage in human intelligence; unlike the traditional private intelligence stereotype (ex-law enforcement, military, or intelligence, age 30 or older), Black Core Security consultants come from a variety of backgrounds.
While we follow a defined intelligence collection plan including targeting, source assessment, and collection management, at Black Core Security, our collectors are our analysts. This allows us to provide highly contextualized reports and estimates written by the same people who collected the information.
At Black Core Security, we have no issues pretexting or using other social engineering techniques that do not violate local laws. Our clients contract us to solve problems, and we are willing to use whatever legal means at our disposal to solve these problems. This is not a lack of ethics, but rather a recognition that ethics is not a matter of black or white. We differentiate ourselves by our ability to navigate the broad grey area within which most private intelligence operates.