"More serious and expensive offerings apply machine learning to internal human resources (HR) records, and work to discover and infiltrate online crime rings."

Their first offering sounds pretty unlikely to yield results and the second seems ethically dubious to undertake for a single client.

If they could turn basic HR records into a detailed threat assessment, they'd be selling that ML breakthrough to everyone in the world rather than pitching online scare stories.

I'm betting "apply machine learning to internal... records" looks more like listing the employees with disciplinary records and going "revoke network access from these people".

The whole tone of the thing was definitely "Your employees hate you, the darknet is scary, you don't understand technology so pay us!"

Like, I get that "disgruntled employee" is less dangerous than "disgruntled employee with expert guidance", but using Tor is already evidence of sophistication. There was nothing stopping these people from going to the library and posting on a normal internet forum, even ten years ago.

Similarly, people stealing all your user information in a movie-style hacker coup is just not that common. Someone flipping a circuit breaker and costing you a bunch of revenue is infinitely more likely, but that's not the headline here because there's no expensive consulting fix for that.