Work experience at Neotas

During my work experience, I have learnt a lot about Neotas. You can find far more information than I thought you could on social media and on publicly accessible data. I’ve also learnt that they do investigations on people and companies to check if they are reputable and eligible for jobs or to see if there is any suspicious activity within the company. They do this by searching public data to find: Names, Dates of birth, Phone numbers, Interests, Friends and family, Education history, Employment history, Location history and other relevant information. The employees at Neotas, I believe, can find out more about you than your friends know about you after years. They can do all of this by using Open Source Intelligence.

Open Source Intelligence is the legal collection of specific data through publicly available sources (e.g. Facebook) to investigate subjects of interest. The reason they use this is to validate the potential employee’s background. If Neotas identify a risk of a breach or potential crime, then they would notify the employer for them to make the decision on if they will work there or not based on the information given.

A CV doesn’t tell you everything about the person, only the things they want you to see, whereas using OSINT you can see everything public. Neotas uses this to investigate companies as well as people to search their public data to find anything that is suspicious and could lead to exposing crime like money laundering and fraud.

If something negative gets flagged, the employer will question the potential employee questioned to see what it is about. This is done to make sure the potential candidate is the right employee to hire for the job. Overall, I believe now that Open Source Intelligence should be used as a process for most jobs to keep the security of the company safe and away from potential risks that could affect the company negatively.

By Tom Anthony