You do not have to be famous to be worth targeting.
The Hostility Index measures how much hostile attention your life generates, just by being who you are. Twenty-one questions, read against a map of ninety-nine heat tags, returning two scores instead of one and a named set of the people it would come from.
The Hostility Index measures the one part of your threat surface you cannot reduce: how much hostile attention your life generates. It reads two things separately and refuses to average them. Exposure is what makes you worth targeting. Pressure is what has already started. Where the two meet is the finding, and it is the part a single score destroys.
Two questions. Kept apart.
Almost every risk instrument asks one question and blends the answers. The blend is the problem. A person who is highly targetable and has never been touched, and a person who is barely targetable and is being harassed daily, come out within a few points of each other. Their situations are close to opposite and the work they need is not the same.
Exposure
What makes you worth targeting.
Exposure exists before anything happens. It is the standing answer to why someone would pick you, and it does not wait for an incident to become true.
- Role, seniority, and the decisions attached to your name
- Public visibility, press presence, and perceived influence
- Searchable records, property, and financial footprint
- Affiliations, stated positions, and the causes tied to you
- Proximity: who you are linked to, and what they attract
Pressure
What is already happening to you.
Pressure is the part that has begun. It is measured on its own so that having been left alone so far cannot be read as being safe.
- Harassment, doxxing, and sustained obsessive attention
- Named grievance-holders and identified actors
- Litigation and press pressure directed at you
- Prior incidents, and whether they resolved or went quiet
- Attention that has moved toward people around you
The window is open
Highly targetable, nothing underway yet. The most useful place to be found, because everything that can be removed can still be removed before anyone is looking for it.
Already in contact
Targetable and actively targeted. Monitoring takes the front and removal continues underneath rather than stopping, because the exposure is what the attention is running on.
Periodic review
Neither structurally exposed nor currently under pressure. The right answer is a cycle and a date to look again, not a program.
Something we can't see
Targeted without being targetable. Something is driving it that a survey cannot see, usually a relationship or an exposure you have not thought to mention. It routes to a person, not a service tier.
Hostility is one of four variables of the Threat Surface Index · It is the variable no one can reduce, which is why we measure it first
Being known and being findable are not the same exposure.
Exposure splits once more, because the two halves are moved by different work and they reach different adversaries.
Who notices you at all. Salience amplifies every adversary, because an actor who has never heard of you does not act on you. It is moved slowly and often not at all, since it is usually the same thing as your career.
Who can actually reach you. Findability amplifies only the actors that need a destination: the fixated, the militant, the criminal, the foreign. It is the half that moves, and moving it is most of what exposure reduction does.
Who is angry, not just how angry.
A flat score treats five signals as five risks. Often they are one adversary described five ways. Every heat tag in the instrument maps to one of ten adversary groups, and the profile that comes back names which of them are live.
A spouse is not an ordinary private person.
Scored on their own record, the husband or wife of a targeted client usually comes back close to zero. They hold no public role, no press presence, and no affiliations of their own, so an instrument that reads only what a person has done will call them safe.
They are not safe. They inherit an adversary profile, and the inheritance is uneven rather than a flat discount.
Institutional adversaries barely carry, because subpoenas and opposition research name individuals. Militant actors carry heavily. Two groups carry at full strength or above, because for them the family member is the better target: kidnap and extortion prefer the child, and fixation routinely redirects to the spouse or becomes about them directly.
The instrument reads the link rather than asking the client to describe their own position in it.
What comes back.
Two axis scores, a composite for the Index, the quadrant you landed in, and the adversary profile behind it. Not a grade. A position, with the reason attached.
The composite exists so the Hostility variable can travel into the Threat Surface Index as a single number. It is not the useful part. The useful part is the pair, the quadrant, and the named groups, and all three are stated with the score rather than summarized away.
Where an adversary group is saturated, the reading says so plainly, even when the rest of the profile looks ordinary. One group running hot is enough to change what should be done, and a composite is exactly the operation that hides it.
What the score is, and what it is not.
The methodology is stated with every score on this site, and that includes the parts that are still being fitted.
Band boundaries are being fitted against analyst judgment on real clients, so that a given value means the same thing to the tool that it means to the person who would advise you. Until that is finished, read the quadrant and the ordering. Treat the absolute value as a position on a scale, not a mark out of a hundred.
A public instrument reads what you tell it. People who have already been targeted consistently under-report it, because minimizing is how most people carry that. For clients, the same model is run against what the intake actually establishes, and the gap between the two is itself a finding.
Hostility is one of the four variables of the Threat Surface Index and it is the one that cannot be reduced. What can be found about you is measured rather than surveyed, which is what an exposure audit is for. This instrument tells you how much it matters that it is findable.
The public reading, and the one run for clients.
Same model, different evidence. What changes is not the questions so much as what the answers are read against.
The public instrument
Open to anyoneTake it without an account, without a name, and without leaving anything behind. The calculation runs in your browser and the reading appears on screen. Give us an email only if you want the longer analysis back, and not otherwise.
- Access
- Public, no login
- Identity
- Anonymous by default
- Length
- Five to ten minutes
- Basis
- What you report
- Returns
- Both scores, the quadrant, the adversary profile
The client instrument
For clientsRun on a private instance for our clients. The household is scored rather than the individual, inherited adversary profiles are computed rather than guessed, and what you report is read against what our work has already established, so both under-reported pressure and pressure the intake conversation missed are surfaced instead of absorbed.
- Access
- hostility.obscureiq.com
- Identity
- Held in confidence
- Scope
- Client and household
- Basis
- Report, read against intake evidence
- Returns
- The above, plus the service posture it argues for
Find out which quadrant you are standing in.
Five to ten minutes, anonymous, and the reading is yours whether or not you ever speak to us.
Most people who take it land in the open window: worth targeting, and not yet targeted. That is the best news the instrument gives, and it is the shortest-lived.
- Phone
- 855.76.ERASE
- info@obscureiq.com
- Counsel
- Introductions on request
- Handling
- Encrypted intake. Off the record by default.