Case Notes

Selected work

Each note states the situation, the approach and the decision it supported.

Protective intelligence · Retained

Situation: A private client with a public profile retained Lyre to hold a standing brief over his personal online exposure. He had no specific incident in mind. The concern was that he had no way of knowing what was already circulating about him, or where.
Approach: Lyre monitors criminal marketplaces and leaked datasets continuously rather than as a one-off sweep, because exposure is cumulative and old material resurfaces repackaged. Successive collections recovered home addresses, telephone numbers, IP addresses, and passwords held in plain text. Some of the credentials were years old. Several were still in use.
Outcome: Credentials were rotated and accounts consolidated before anything was attempted against them. Listings were removed from the brokers that would act, and the remainder were logged so that reappearances could be recognised rather than treated as new. The client now receives a standing picture of his own exposure instead of learning about it from whoever exploits it.

Due diligence · Pre-investment

Situation: A company was closing a funding round. One prospective investor had come through an informal introduction and was offering terms better than anyone else at the table. The founders wanted the introduction checked before signing, and wanted it done without the investor learning that checks were being made.
Approach: Commercial screening returned nothing adverse, which was itself the reason to keep going rather than to stop. Lyre worked outward from the individual’s corporate footprint into the court records of the jurisdictions where his earlier ventures had been incorporated. Proceedings surfaced there that no commercial provider had indexed, because the filings sat outside the sources those providers draw on.
Outcome: The round closed without him. The company avoided a shareholder whose presence would have required disclosure at every subsequent raise, and the cost of the work was a fraction of what removing an investor after the fact would have run to.

Protective intelligence · Organisational risk

Situation: An organisation whose work attracted organised opposition was responding to incidents after they occurred. Every response was improvised, and every disruption was absorbed in full.
Approach: The groups involved organised in the open. Collection was therefore a matter of reading what they published and understanding how their planning translated into action. Lyre tracked declared intentions across their own channels and assessed which were likely to be acted on, with what support and on what timescale. The output was an assessment with dates and confidence attached, rather than a feed of alerts.
Outcome: The organisation moved from reacting to preparing. Resourcing and access arrangements were set against specific dates, and what did occur was planned for rather than absorbed.

For sensitive, complex or unconventional requirements, contact Lyre for an initial confidential discussion.