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Showing posts from May, 2026

THE WISDOM DROUGHT THE HIDDEN IRONY OF MODERN CORPORATE INTELLIGENCE

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  About the Author Jasmine Opperman is a world-renowned intelligence professional specialising in extremism and intelligence within the mining sector. She served for over 20 years in the South African intelligence services, rising to the position of Provincial Head of the Eastern Cape for the National Intelligence Agency (NIA). She is currently an advisor and senior intelligence analyst for both Fulcrum Analytics and the Fulcrum Intel Digest service.  We tend to think of intelligence failures as the domain of spies and secret agencies. But when a Fortune 500 company spends millions on market research and still fails to see a disruptive competitor coming, it is suffering from the exact same pathology: a wisdom drought. Executive Summary In an era defined by exponential data generation and complex transnational threats, such as Southern Africa's cross-border illicit mining syndicates, corporate survival demands a continuous, technology-augmented intelligence ecosystem. This pape...

The Quiet Harvest: Corporate Espionage Targeting Foreign Businesses in Africa and the Intelligence Gap That Enables It

About the author:  Nijat Babazade Threat Intelligence analyst Institution: FH BFI Vienna   . Most foreign businesses operating in Africa carry a mental map of the risks they face. Armed conflict in unstable zones. Regulatory unpredictability. Fraud at the transactional level. What rarely appears on that map is the more deliberate, structured threat: the systematic targeting of their people, their data, and their competitive intelligence by actors with the patience and capability to wait months before taking anything of value. Corporate espionage against foreign firms in Africa is not a marginal phenomenon. It is a growth sector, and the gap between how most corporate security functions are configured and what the actual threat environment demands has never been wider. This article examines who is running these operations, how they work in practice, what the early indicators look like, and what a protective intelligence function needs to do differently. It tries to do so wi...