Reconnaissance

There are many situations where additional intelligence gathering can help inform business decisions. Examples include:

• Evaluating a potential supplier before entering into a long-term contract.
• Investigating a prospective acquisition target.
• Performing due diligence on a strategic partner.
• Assessing the legitimacy and reputation of a prospective client.
• Understanding the operational and reputational risks associated with a contractor or consultant.
• Identifying potential conflicts of interest, public controversies, or legal issues that may affect a business relationship.

The goal is not to make decisions on behalf of your organisation, but rather to provide additional information that can support informed decision-making.

Our investigations rely exclusively on lawfully and ethically obtained information from public sources. These may include many diverse sources, such as an organisation's public website, social media accounts, domain name registrations, public legal and financial records (for example through Companies House and equivalent registries), public security incident information, media reporting, public regulatory actions and enforcement notices, and public procurement records. The specific sources used depend on the organisation being assessed and your specific objectives.

While the information used in open-source intelligence is often relatively standard, its collation into insights capable of meaningfully informing operational decisions is highly nontrivial. Individually, many of the sources open-source intelligence draws on contain only fragments of information. The value of open-source intelligence often lies not in any single source but rather in identifying connections, patterns, and risks that may not be apparent when each source is considered in isolation.

We can use a variety of techniques to identify and analyse relevant information, including specialist search engines, online archives, automated collection and analysis tools, and professional intelligence platforms. All research is conducted with careful consideration of applicable legal, regulatory, and data protection requirements.

Some investigations involve information volumes that are difficult to analyse effectively through manual review alone. Shellhex possesses proficiency with data analysis, as our Data Science and Data Visualisation services illustrate. Where appropriate, we can supplement our reconnaissance work with data science, automated analysis, and visualisation techniques to help identify patterns, relationships, and anomalies within large collections of information. Examples of applications may include:

• Mapping relationships between organisations, individuals, suppliers, and other entities.
• Analysing large collections of public records, filings, procurement data, or other structured information.
• Identifying unusual patterns in public activity, communications, or organisational relationships.
• Visualising complex dependency networks and supply chains.
• Summarising large volumes of information into formats suitable for executive decision-making.
• Producing diagrams, charts, and other visualisations to support investigation findings.

The goal of these techniques is not merely to collect more information, but to make complex information easier to understand. In many cases, visualisation can reveal relationships and risk factors that are difficult to identify from raw data alone.

Our Reconnaissance service is designed to provide a clearer picture of an external organisation before important business decisions are made. Our typical deliverable is a report, along with an optional consultation session to discuss the report. This report will outline our methodologies and conclusions, in particular:

• Sources of relevant public information.
• Potential security, operational, reputational, or business risks.
• Assessment of publicly observable indicators of organisational maturity.
• Notable historical incidents, controversies, or security events where relevant.
• Analysis of relationships and dependencies that may influence risk.

Where appropriate, findings may be categorised according to their potential relevance to security, operational resilience, regulatory compliance, financial risk, or reputation.

Our pricing for Reconnaissance services depends on the complexity of the investigation and the depth of analysis required. We scale pricing based on the complexity of the review requested.