Corporate Dirty Laundry: Where is it Hanging?

Back in February we mentioned a few sources of corporate praise and blame. As we often emphasize, anyone involved in enterprise resilience today cannot underestimate the potential impact of rumors and proprietary information flowing through anonymous online forums or blogs. These are our favorite OSInt starting point:

• Anonymous Employer – This appears to be an actual business which claims to make an attempt to contact the company subject of an anonymous report. Although free, their goal is to provide consulting and technology for corporate communication. There is no company directory or name search which means a subscription is required for it to be of any use. On the plus side, it’s a ‘wait and see’ approach for corporate security since any complaint logged to the system would be directly forwarded to the employer.

• BossBitching: As the title suggests, mostly focused on individuals rather than companies as a whole. Most comments we saw bore no direct reference to people or companies and number of posts we found for search and browsing was exceptionally small. Only worth mentioning in light of potential, future expansion – today, it is of little or no value. >>>

• Fu**ed Company: This probably belongs to the anti-corporate sites category but its affiliated InternalMemos (a fee-based site) qualifies it for this list as well. We found the site to be often non-responsive and the content of dubious value beyond that of traditional news and blog searches. We couldn’t judge the quality of the internal memos available for purchase but we’d check the site here and there.

• The Funded: ‘Vertical’ venting – strictly dedicated to Venture Capital firms and players – it is definitely the most accomplished from a technical standpoint, and rapidly growing in popularity. A must for those in or interested in the VC industry.

• JobVent: This is an instant favorite. The site has a solid content (it has already a couple of years under its belt, and it is safe to say it is time for Progressive Insurance and Northwest Airlines to take a look at JobVent!), an interesting rating mechanism and a very handy RSS feed option. It must be noted that employment or company affiliation is not verified but this is offset by the number of users/comments where applicable.

• Overhear.us: The site verifies company affiliation by confirming the email domain of those posting issues and complains. This also ensures that only those from the same company or domain (except for public groups posts) are visible to each other. The company directory available for general browsing suggested that this is not a very popular service yet. Might be worth keeping track of.

• Wurkpal: One of the latest entries to this space, it has an interesting approach by creating a private, anonymous chat space solely on the basis of the users’ IP address (your corporate/organizational domain). It is not clear if it keeps any historical record or search capabilities. It is also so probably too young to have significant traffic but certainly worth keeping on the radar. It would seem that for corporate security to keep an open channel (page) on the site would cost nothing while possibly deriving some value from it.

Needless to say, always start with a good dose of Google Blog Search.

Thanks and acknowledgments to Techcrunch for keeping track of these services.