The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #77
Using VS Code and Copilot for OSINT Investigations
👋 Welcome to the 77th issue of The OSINT Newsletter. This issue contains OSINT news, community posts, tactics, techniques, and tools to help you become a better investigator. Here’s an overview of what’s in this issue:
OSINT in Counter-terrorism
OSINT for China
ChatGPT concerns
New OSINT bookmarklets
Soundcloud to YouTube
Geolocation Visrecce
🚨 The first episode of The OSINT Podcast will cover the topics in this newsletter. Moving forward, the podcast will cover topics in the newsletter in depth, providing a different perspective, emphasizing OSINT tradecraft.
🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
⚡ Investigating Public Records for OSINT - Companies House
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 Op-Ed: David Cook: How publicly available clues could thwart the next lone actor terror attack
OSINT for counter-terrorism. Not for stalking people online. For fighting terrorism. This isn’t fringe or underground anymore. It’s mainstream and it’s been this way for a while. I find myself using OSINT methods for things unrelated to security or investigation more and more these days.
"Precision — not dragnet surveillance — is what OSINT does best. It can chart a person’s, or a group’s, grievances trajectory in real time, spotlight a sudden surge in violent verbs, or correlate a spike in flamethrower tutorials with an unusual hardware purchase."🎩 H/T: David Cook
📰 Investigating Chinese Content for OSINT
Do not sleep on China. You don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to be a Mandarin speaker. You just need to not be seeing OSINT resources for investigating Chinese content for the first time when it’s your turn. You should have sock puppets for some of these social media platforms already on the shelf. This list will get you started.
🎩 H/T: Justen Charters
📰 ChatGPT Public Conversations Indexed on Google
If you monitor OSINT News, you’re likely already aware of this. I bring it up here as a reminder that anything that can be shared, might be discovered.
In this case, the user had to click a check box that makes the GPT conversation indexable but the way it was phrased could cause confusion. I’m sure a lot people assumed the recipient wouldn’t be able to view it if it wasn’t discoverable and I’m sure a lot of people weren’t sure how to undo this either.
💡A useful OSINT tip: nearly every time there’s a feature in an app that allows you to share content externally, make note of the URL it produces. There are often specific elements of that URL unique to a shared post. Query them with the site: dork to see if they’re indexed. Public
Google Sheets are also indexed:
site:docs.google.com/spreadsheets🎩 H/T: Oliver Molander
OSINT Tools
🔎 New OSINT Bookmarklets from My OSINT Training
If you don’t way to pay for expensive web apps and don’t have the skillset or patience to work with GitHub tools, bookmarklets are an excellent in between. Here are 2 new bookmarklets you can add to your collection.
🎩 H/T: Micah Hoffman
🎩 H/T:
🔎 TraceTracks
I’ve never thought of a song as a pivot point—and I’m thinking about OSINT methods all the time. That’s why I wanted to mention this tool. You may not ever need to pivot from SoundCloud to YouTube but this tool reminds you to think outside of the box. Anything unique can be a pivot. TraceTracks is an example.
🎩 H/T: Oblivios
🔎 GeoHints
When I was in the military, part of my intelligence training was aircraft and naval visual recognition (visrecce). I used to be able to look at a military aircraft silouette from a distance and tell you within seconds what kind of plane it was. Geobolt does the same thing with Geoguessr. GeoHints helps you be like Geobolt.
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⚡ Using VS Code and Copilot for OSINT Investigations
VS Code is more than a code editor. With Copilot integrated, it’s a powerful workstation. I’ve been using it more and more for various operations daily. There are limits, of course, but I’ll show you how you can use it to power up your intelligence workflow before lunchtime.
👀 All paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!
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