The most expensive attack needs no code.
It needs a person. Foreign intelligence services, competitors and organised crime deliberately recruit the people who have access: board members, engineers, deal teams, assistants. Sentia Strategies is private counterintelligence for companies in Europe. We make your key people the hardest target in the room.
Espionage is no longer a risk. It is routine.
What security services and industry report is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a market, and your organisation is part of it whether you know it or not.
Damage to the German economy from theft, espionage and sabotage in just twelve months.
Bitkom, Wirtschaftsschutz 2026 ↗of companies surveyed were affected or suspect they were. The question is no longer whether.
Bitkom, Wirtschaftsschutz 2026 ↗name deliberately acting (former) employees as perpetrators. A further 23% name unwitting ones.
Bitkom, Wirtschaftsschutz 2026 ↗is the average cost of a breach by a malicious insider. The most expensive attack vector of all.
IBM, Cost of a Data Breach 2025 ↗The weak point is not technical. It is human.
In intelligence tradecraft, the acronym MICE sums up the classic motives. Add what psychologists know from every practice: loneliness, grievance, conflicts of loyalty. Nobody is immune. But anyone can learn to recognise the moment they are being used.
Money
Debt, an expensive lifestyle, a divorce, a bonus that never came. Money is rarely the start, but often the lever.
Ideology
Conviction, sympathy for a country, a sense of justice. Those who believe they are doing the right thing do not feel like traitors.
Compromise
A mistake, an affair, a photograph, a small breach that must not come out. A favour becomes a dependency.
Ego
Passed over for promotion, underestimated by the board. At last someone who values your work. The most effective motive of all.
For the people whose compromise would be existential.
Discreet, preventive, personal. We work with few clients at a time and accept a limited number of new mandates each quarter.
What an approach looks like in practice.
Short, factual analyses of the situations in which executives and key people are most exposed.
Can people be inoculated against manipulation?
Psychological resilience is not a character trait. Research has shown for decades that it can be trained.
The call from the CEO that did not come from the CEO
Deceptively realistic voices and videos turn social engineering into a precision weapon. What companies can do about it.
Business travel to high-risk countries
Unfamiliar networks, unfamiliar rules, long evenings in hotel bars. Why travel is an executive's most vulnerable moment.
Psychology, not checklists. Four phases, one aim: people who cannot be bought.
Recognise
What an approach looks like before it is recognisable as one: the chance conversation, the unusual attention, the small favour.
Understand
Which personal motives can be used: recognition, grievance, money worries, ambition, loneliness. Without judgement, but precisely.
Resist
Conversation techniques that protect without damaging relationships. Stay courteous, give nothing away, set clear limits.
Anchor
A culture in which loyalty is lived and unusual contacts are reported without embarrassment.
We strengthen people. We do not watch them.
- Discretion
- No client names, no case histories, no publicity. Discretion is our only reference.
- No surveillance
- We do not profile individual employees and provide no loyalty scores to the employer.
- No investigations
- Actual suspicions belong with the authorities. We refer and coordinate.
- No deception without mandate
- Simulations only on written instruction and announced in advance.
The question is not whether someone will ask. It is who will answer.
A confidential first conversation about your situation. Under NDA on request, in person, and without traces in your calendar.