The newest spy pitch may not arrive in a dark bar. It may already be waiting in your inbox.

I’m dating myself, but back in my day, spy hunting was quite different from today’s use of a keyboard to chase a digital trail. In the age of dead drops and signal sites, my typical morning began with a quick cup of coffee, suiting up into one of many disguises, and hefting two duffel bags of gear into the back seat of my unmarked, undercover car. Some days I was an office worker. Other days I was a college student, a K Street business casual type, or the guy in cargo pants and a sweater taking a perfectly normal walk in a park while secretly carrying enough surveillance anxiety to power a small federal building.

I would drive to the site where my team of undercover ghosts would set up on a target for the day. We physically followed people. We used camera equipment and optics worth thousands of dollars, swapped disguises, coordinated moving surveillance, and relied on some of the best tradecraft on earth to keep a target in pocket and never get made.

One trick we learned was to watch for government personnel stepping out of work for lunch in their shirtsleeves and pocket protectors. We often knew where they worked by the ID hanging from a lanyard or clipped to a belt. If an intelligence officer target was in the area, we went eyes up and tracked all movement to see whether we lucked into a meet.

Recruitment used to operate on a slow burn. It often began in one of the legendary Washington, D.C. bars, where happy hour started early and poor judgment came with a garnish.

Imagine Anatoly. He lives under a cover story, posing as a businessman from Ukraine who is in Washington to encourage trade. He bumps into George at the Sign of the Whale, a bar only blocks from Dupont Circle and strategically close to Camelot and Joanna’s, two famous strip clubs that catered to the lunch crowd in the nineties and aughts. Anatoly has identified George as a possible recruit for two reasons. First, George is wearing a government badge that marks him as a contractor to the Department of Defense who works for a nearby think tank. Second, he is two martinis into a very wet lunch.

George is lonely, struggling through a messy divorce, and drinking his way through the week. Anatoly learns that George despises his boss and can barely get through the day without a dose of liquid courage at noon. They take the conversation over to Camelot and share stories at a dark table under a dim light over steaks and a third round of martinis. Anatoly seems to have an endless stack of dollar bills for George to hand to the dark-haired beauty dancing in front of them. It is the best day George has had in years.

Their meetings continue for weeks, until one afternoon Anatoly shows up late, disheveled, and unshaven. His eyes look haunted. He tries to wave off his distress.

“We’re friends,” George says gently. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

Anatoly spins a tale of failure that resonates perfectly with George’s misery. He has not met his trade connection quotas at work. He is at risk of termination, which means deportation back to Ukraine. George is thunderstruck. How will he get through the week without his drinking buddy?

“Can I help?” George asks, gripping his friend’s shoulder.

Anatoly appears to wrestle internally. His face swims through emotions. Finally, he meets George’s eyes in the dim light of the club and makes the request that all these weeks have built toward.

“You could help. Your think tank is working to limit Russian oil exports. Obviously, my country has an equal interest. If you gave me a list of companies the United States government is investigating, I could contact some of those companies and try to switch them from Russia to my country.” His eyes fall. “I know this is a big ask.”

George considers it. He knows the list is classified, but barely classified. It is not like he is helping Russia. Anatoly is from Ukraine. More importantly, it will keep his friend here. George owes him everything. Anatoly even somehow masterminded a date with George’s favorite dancer at Camelot.

That is the trap. Not the martinis. Not the dancer. Not even the lie about Ukraine. The trap is friendship, need, pride, loneliness, resentment, and the quiet human desire to matter to someone.

Today, Anatoly does not need a bar near Dupont Circle. He does not need steaks, martinis, a fake passport, or a stack of dollar bills. He does not even need to leave Beijing.

He sends a connection request.

Last week, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance released a joint bulletin warning that China’s military intelligence services are using professional networking sites and online job platforms to target people with access to classified or privileged information (you can bet Russia does this too). The warning describes fake recruiters, fake consulting opportunities, test assignments, encrypted messaging apps, and paid follow-up work that gradually moves the target from ordinary career conversation into intelligence collection.

In the old days, the intelligence officer needed to spot you in the wild. Today, your profile does the spotting for him. Your job history reveals your access. Your posts reveal your frustrations. Your network reveals your colleagues. Your résumé reveals what you know. Your career ambitions reveal what you want.

The platforms might have changed but the psychology has not.

The process is classic intelligence tradecraft. First comes spotting, when the recruiter identifies someone with access, vulnerability, or influence. Then comes assessment, when the recruiter determines whether that person is lonely, ambitious, angry, underpaid, flattered, or careless. Then comes cultivation, when the relationship feels useful, friendly, and harmless. Then comes tasking, when the first request arrives wrapped in reasonableness.

The first request is designed to feel safe. The second feels easier. The third begins to compromise you. This is why the modern recruitment pitch is so dangerous. It does not look like espionage. It looks like opportunity. It looks like a side hustle, an expert network, a consulting engagement, or a recruiter who has finally noticed how brilliant you are. That last part is especially cruel because every good recruitment operation begins by telling the target the thing he already wants to believe.

Spies have been saying some version of that sentence since the first ambitious man whispered a secret to the first stranger who bought him a drink.

The difference is scale. A foreign intelligence service no longer needs to put one Anatoly in one bar and hope George walks in wearing a badge. It can build fake companies, fake profiles, fake job postings, and fake opportunities, then aim them at thousands of people across government, defense, academia, journalism, technology, and the private sector.

Some targets will ignore the message. Some will investigate. Some will report it.
But some will reply and That is all the adversary needs.

Anatoly always starts with the same move. He makes you feel seen. Then he asks for something small. Then he waits to see whether you will become George.

Every intelligence operation begins with trust, and every good scammer knows that trust is easier to manufacture when the target wants the offer to be real.

Before accepting a consulting opportunity, completing a sample assignment, joining a private chat, opening a shared file, or discussing your professional expertise with a stranger, verify the person, the company, and the end client independently. Do not rely on the platform where the person contacted you. Do not rely on a polished profile. Do not rely on a professional-looking website. Do not rely on the fact that someone is willing to pay you.

Payment can be part of the trap.

The best rule is simple. If someone wants your expertise, they should be able to explain who they are, who they represent, why they want you, how the work will be used, and why the conversation needs to move forward. If they cannot answer those questions clearly, you should not provide anything sensitive, nonpublic, or work-related.
Opportunity is wonderful. Unverified opportunity is bait.

The FBI recently warned that ShinyHunters has targeted an online learning-management system used by educational institutions and students across the country. The breach story itself is familiar. What deserves fresh attention is the next move. According to the FBI, ShinyHunters commonly pressures victims with threatening texts, phone calls, and sometimes swatting against victims and their family members.

That does not necessarily mean every student’s parents are getting calls. But it does show where cyber extortion is headed. A cyber criminal may steal data from a school platform, then use names, emails, student IDs, private messages, or other exposed details to make a threat feel personal. The call might claim the criminal has sensitive information, threaten to release records, or try to panic a student, employee, or family member into pressuring the institution to pay.

The lesson is simple: modern breaches no longer stop at the firewall. Increasingly, the attack continues through the phone in your pocket.

The world has changed. Cybercriminals, foreign intelligence services, scammers, and AI-powered fraudsters are no longer targeting only governments and Fortune 500 companies. They are targeting all of us.

That is why I wrote SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME.

The book pulls readers inside the real world of espionage, cybercrime, betrayal, surveillance, and modern digital warfare using lessons I learned hunting spies for the FBI and protecting organizations under attack.

If you want to better understand how deception works, how cybercriminals manipulate trust, and how to think more clearly in a world filled with digital lies, start here:

Want more? My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold. And it’s FREE!

Negotiation is one of humanity's oldest arts—treaties, salaries, used cars, hostage releases, pizza slices. Now AI wants in.

Researchers studying AI negotiation found something striking: the most effective AI negotiators weren't the most ruthless. Warmth, empathy, and cooperation improved outcomes—even between machines. Apparently even software hates dealing with a jerk.
This matters because AI agents are moving from chatbots to autonomous systems acting on our behalf. Businesses are already exploring AI-negotiated contracts and purchases at scales humans can't match.

Picture the consumer version: you tell your AI assistant you need a flight, hotel, and rental car. It searches, compares, and negotiates upgrades and rates—while the airline's AI, the hotel's AI, and the rental company's AI negotiate back. You're no longer haggling with a company. Your software is haggling with theirs.

Convenient, until you ask: will we get better deals, or will companies just build better machines to make sure we don't?

The spy hunter in me finds this fascinating—negotiation, like recruitment, is about influence. The best intelligence officers don't bully; they read the room, build rapport, understand pressure and ego. Now AI is learning the same lesson: persuasion beats force.

Even the robots are learning tradecraft.

I recently joined Steve Moore for part two of a fascinating conversation on the future of cybersecurity, ransomware, and the rise of AI-powered insider threats. We explored how attackers increasingly operate like intelligence services, spending weeks mapping networks, studying employee behavior, and identifying the most valuable data before launching an attack.

One of my favorite parts of the discussion focused on agentic AI and what happens when an AI agent inside an organization gains too much access or begins making decisions nobody intended it to make. As AI becomes embedded in daily business operations, organizations will need to monitor digital insiders just as carefully as human ones.

If you’re interested in ransomware, AI security, insider threats, and why today’s CISOs need to think more like counterintelligence officers than network administrators, I think you’ll enjoy the conversation.

Watch here:

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The AI tool you tried last quarter waited for a prompt, hallucinated a number, then asked if you'd like a summary.

Viktor opened a PR at 2am, rebased it against main, ran your test suite, and posted a note in #eng: "Two flaky tests in payments service, both pre-existing. Recommended merging after fixing them." Then drafted the customer reply for the support ticket the bug created.

That's 619K autonomous actions per day across 20,000+ teams. Not chat replies. Real work shipped to GitHub, Stripe, Linear, Notion, and 3,000+ other tools, from inside Slack and Microsoft Teams.

You don't supervise him any more than you supervise a senior engineer.

SOC 2 certified. Your data never trains models.

"It's what you probably originally thought AI was going to be when you first heard of it in sci-fi movies." Tyler, CEO.

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Praemonitus Praemunitus!

~ Eric

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