Project Compass vs. The Com
3–2–2026 (Monday)
Hello, and welcome to The Intentional Brief - your weekly video update on the one big thing in cybersecurity for middle market companies, their investors, and executive teams.
I’m your host, Shay Colson, Managing Partner at Intentional Cybersecurity, and you can find us online at intentionalcyber.com.
Today is Monday, March 2, 2026, and the US and Israel are at war with Iran. As of this recording, there has been very little mention of cyber in terms of this conflict’s battlespace, which I have to say I find a bit surprising given that all three primary actors - including Iran - have highly advanced cyber capabilities.
Perhaps it’s the case that we’ve learned from our Israeli allies to use them more quietly, or perhaps they simply aren’t in play (yet).
But we’re going to look today at some of these instances where the speed that cyber moves and the speed that government and regulation move aren’t always aligned.
Project Compass vs. The Com
Today, we’re going to dig in to a good article from last week by the team at CyberScoop detailing Project Compass, a “coordinated operation by Europol with support from 28 countries, including all members of the Five Eyes,” which “has resulted in the arrest of 30 perpetrators since the initiative got underway in January 2025.”
For those of you who maybe haven’t been tracking this threat actor as closely, The Com is a loosely coordinated network that targets young and vulnerable minors for exploitation.
They work in three primary areas, including “Cyber Com,” “Offline Com,” and “Extortion Com.”
Project Compass, which is coordinated by Europol’s European Counter Terrorism Centre, they’re asserting some very real wins in the past year, including:
4 victims safeguarded
30 perpetrators arrested
62 identified and partially identified victims
179 identified and partially identified perpetrators
9 joint awareness-raising activities
While this hasn’t, unfortunately, taken the entire network down, it certainly serves as both an example of successful international coordination, but also serves as a very real deterrent to current and future criminals.
This is an important effort at a time when the cost to launch these attacks continues to come down, including both toolkits and AI capabilities, and we see unrest amongst younger populations around the world.
One of the frames they use here that I haven’t seen before is that they call them not only “persistent” and “socially connected” (not unlike The Com), but also “addicted.”
There’s a difficult dynamic here that’s under explored, but very real. This is one very important reason why the deterrent effect needs to be front and center for young people considering this path.
The escapist nature, with consequences abstracted away by screens and distance, can lead to some very bad decisions by people who still have parts of their brain in development.
It’s also a relatively rare win in international collaboration, which has been so hard to come by lately.
Finally, it puts in stark contrast the pace of justice and law enforcement efforts. Those wheels certainly don’t turn fast, but they do seem to keep turning.
Meanwhile, watch this space and check in on your kids and their friends.
Fundraising
From a fundraising perspective, back to more “normal” numbers, but still strong, with more than $17B in newly committed capital last week, more than half of which came from:
Greenbriar Equity Group, who raised $5.4b for its seventh PE fund; and
Novacap, who raised nearly $3.8b for its seventh flagship tech buyout fund.
A reminder that you can find links to all the articles we covered below, find back issues of these videos and the written transcripts at intentionalcyber.com, and now sign up for our monthly newsletter, the Intentional Dispatch.
We’ll see you next week for another edition of the Intentional Brief.
Links
https://cyberscoop.com/project-compass-the-com-europol/
https://www.europol.europa.eu/operations-services-and-innovation/operations/project-compass