Sofia Salazar, Junior Analyst
Ms. Salazar joined Hg in December 2021. As a Junior Open Source Intelligence Analyst, she is responsible for foundational work in risk assessment and removal, monitoring, and social media/cyber/background investigations for Hg clients. Ms. Salazar conducts risk monitoring to ensure the safety and integrity of Hg clients’ lives, properties, and reputations by utilizing a suite of OSINT collection tools. She is skillfully adept at monitoring current events and information on the internet through multiple social media platforms, geofencing, and the dark web. In 2020, Ms. Salazar was awarded the OSMOSIS Institute’s Open Source Rising Star of the Year award for her rapid vetting, assessment, and dissemination a Beirut explosion 20 minutes before the first major U.S. breaking news alert.
Prior to joining Hg, Ms. Salazar served as an Intelligence Analyst and Operations Lead at SafeAbroad, where she monitored and assessed intelligence on international risks, evaluated trends in global security issues, and developed analytic products to improve the intelligence collection and analysis capabilities of her team. In this capacity, Sofia leveraged a mix of OSINT and SOCMINT tools to make rapid decisions about ongoing incidents, frequently before they were reported by mainstream news—including security and terror threats, civil unrest, health outbreaks, and natural disasters. Ms. Salazar graduated with honors from the University of New Haven with a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice and National Security Studies with a minor in Russian Studies, completing research on gun control with the Department of Homeland Security as her thesis topic. She is fluent in Spanish, advanced French, and intermediate Russian. Ms. Salazar is currently working towards earning a Masters of Arts in Criminology at George Washington University.