Frequently asked
questions.

BlackPING is a Toronto-based signal intelligence service. It watches cyber, public-safety, infrastructure and environmental signals relevant to Canada and turns them into short, sourced briefs that a person has checked. AI-assisted, human-led: a model does the first pass, an analyst makes the call.

No. What appears in the Signals directory is a curated set of dated public reports, not a real-time alert stream. Every record carries its publication date and a link to the original source, so nothing can be mistaken for something happening right now.

Security teams, emergency-response organisations, public-safety and critical-infrastructure operators, and businesses that need a Canadian read on a threat before it lands on their desk.

The live platform runs at blackping.io and is approval-gated. This site — blackping.ca — is the public front door: the homepage workspace walkthrough, the Signals directory, the AI tools, and the About, Contact and Apply pages.

Apply on the Apply for access page: your name, work email, organisation, role, sector, province or territory, and what you need BlackPING for. Applications are held as pending until they are reviewed, and no more than two are accepted from the same address per day. Approved clients continue at blackping.io/request-access.

Email hello@blackping.io or use the contact form — both are answered by the team, and up to three enquiries per address per hour are accepted. No phone line is published yet, so email is the fastest route. If you are in immediate danger, call 911.

BlackPING’s AI features ask a language model through an AI gateway — a service that routes a request to the model and returns the answer. The gateway key and the analyst instructions are held on BlackPING’s server, never in your browser, and the reply is streamed to the page as it is written.

An OpenAI model requested through the gateway’s Responses API, with a deliberately low reasoning effort so answers arrive quickly, and with provider-side storage of the request switched off. The exact model can be changed without touching the pages you use.

Three things, each with a different job:

• Threat triage — describe a suspicious message, email, call, text or event and get a preliminary assessment, the red flags observed, the Canadian angle, and safe immediate steps.
• Ask about a signal — pick a published Canadian report, ask a question, and get a short brief grounded only in that record, with the gaps named.
• Business impact — pick a report or describe a concern and get likely impact, business exposure, and what to do in the next 24 hours and next 30 days.

It is instructed not to. Briefs and business-impact answers are built only from the source record the server reads for the report you selected; anything the source does not establish is answered “Not in source” rather than guessed, and no date, name, number or indicator may be invented. Triage is different: it works only from what you describe, and will not claim to have opened a link.

No. The assistants are instructed never to ask for passwords, one-time codes or personal identifiers, and never to open a link you paste. Please don’t include credentials or personal identifiers in what you describe.

Triage and business-impact text is sent to the model to produce your answer; for briefs, your question is paired with the report’s own record. Contact enquiries and access applications are stored so a person can reply to you. AI drafts you save in the workspace stay inside your account.

No. Models draft, summarise and rank. An analyst signs off before anything is published as a BlackPING brief, and the system is built so that step cannot be skipped.

You will see a plain error and can try again — nothing you typed is lost, and no partial answer is presented as a finished one. The contact form and the Signals directory keep working.

Public, open and partner-shared sources relevant to Canadian cyber, public-safety, infrastructure and environmental risk. Each record keeps its source name, the original link, and the passage it was drawn from.

Open the Signals directory and expand Source evidence on any record to read the passage itself, then follow Read original report. In a brief, every line is tagged with the part of the record it came from.

A bottom line answering your question, the key points, why it matters in Canada, what the source does not establish, a recommended review, and a confidence rating with a reason — each factual line cited to its source.

Yes — that is the bar for publishing. Author review (the person who wrote the draft has read it) is kept separate from accredited analyst verification, and only a brief approved by an admin is published. Drafts stay private until then.

Admins only. Roles are stored in the database, and a guard prevents any account without the admin role from setting or changing a publication date — so an analyst cannot publish their own work, and a client cannot publish anything at all.

Yes, in the workspace after signing in. Anything you submit or draft belongs to your account and stays private until you submit it for review.

A signal can be exported as a PDF that carries the source link and the handling note, so a copy circulated internally still points back to where it came from.

Call 911 for any immediate danger. For suspected fraud contact the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre on 1-888-495-8501, and for cyber guidance the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security at cyber.gc.ca.

With Google, from the sign-in page. Approved clients reach the live platform at blackping.io/client-access.

Yes. Signals and briefs you save are visible only to your account until you submit them for review; the database enforces that at the row level rather than relying on the page to hide them.

No. There are no public dashboards of client data and no live feeds served to anonymous visitors. Public records are the curated reports in the Signals directory, nothing more.

Two applications from one email address per day, and three enquiries per hour, is the limit — the page tells you when you have reached it. A refused application is not a decision about you; it is the same message being sent twice in quick succession.

Email hello@blackping.io with the page and, for an AI answer, the text you submitted and the reply you got. That is enough for the team to trace the run and correct the source record or the instructions behind it.