The OSINT Newsletter

The OSINT Newsletter

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The OSINT Newsletter
The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #23
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The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #23

The latest and greatest in OSINT news, tools, tactics, and techniques

Jake Creps's avatar
Jake Creps
Sep 25, 2023
∙ Paid
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The OSINT Newsletter
The OSINT Newsletter
The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #23
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👋 Welcome to the 23rd issue of The OSINT Newsletter. This issue contains OSINT news, community posts, tactics, techniques, and tools to help you become a better investigator. My goal with this newsletter is to help promote the OSINT industry, develop better investigators, and raise awareness of ethical use cases for open source intelligence.

🙏 It’s unbelievable to think that The OSINT Newsletter already has over 6000 subscribers. When I relaunched the newsletter in March, I only had 2600 subscribers. Thank you for sticking with me and helping me grow this publication. The kind words from paid subscribers and the support from the community keep this thing alive.

🏆 Geolocation challenge

In what city was this image taken? What are the specific coordinates?

The first person to click the “Solve” button and provide the city gets 1 month of paid access to The OSINT Newsletter. The person with the closest coordinates to where the image was taken from will also get 1 month of paid access.

The solve button last issue didn’t work. It was supposed to lead you to the comment section of this newsletter. What people did instead was just reply to this email with their answer. Let’s do this moving forward.

Reply to this email with your answer and winners will be announced on Friday.

🪃 In case you missed recent newsletters, here are a few links to help you catch up.

OSINT Newsletter - Issue #22

OSINT Newsletter - Issue #22

Jake Creps
·
September 18, 2023
Read full story
OSINT Newsletter - Issue #21

OSINT Newsletter - Issue #21

Jake Creps
·
September 11, 2023
Read full story

Let’s get started. ⬇️


OSINT News

📰 How to find the administrator of an Onion site

On Tor, Onion addresses have the folklore of being completely private, impossible to trace; however, by analyzing DNS traffic or looking for patterns in cryptocurrency transactions, you can easily identify the admin of an Onion site.

Read more on OSINT Ambition…

📰 Geolocating Social Links’ Co-Founder via OSINT techniques

There was a challenge by Ivan Shkvarun, the CEO of Social Links, to geolocate his exact location based on a photo. Ron Kaminsky was able to locate him and did a write up on exactly how he did it. He shares several tips and tricks for geolocation in this post that will make anyone a better investigator.

Read more on Medium…

📰 Geolocation and AI with StreetClip: introduction, country classification, and building a web interface

StreetClip is an open source geolocation model that classifies images by country with an accuracy of up to 91.96%. JeremyK writes about a script that can be used to classify images with StreeClip. The script takes an image as input and outputs a list of countries with associated confidence scores.

Read more on Medium…

📰 Give me your username. I’ll tell you who you are!

Techjournalist writes an essay about digital privacy and the use of OSINT in Germany. This is a great article for the OSINT mindset and for protecting yourself and others online.

Read more on OSINT Team…

📰 When you need to search by nickname in public IP addresses search engines (Shodan, Netlas, Fofa etc.)

Cyber Detective writes about an OSINT workflow starting with a username or a first and last name (full name) and pivoting into more advanced techniques like searching for usernames across URLs not listed in search engines using tools like Shodan.

Read more on OSINT Ambition…


OSINT Community

📺 World's best ai vs geoguessr pro

AI might be sophisticated enough to do complex geolocation. It’s not 100% but it’s getting better every day. Let’s see how it matches up against Rainbolt (Geoguessr pro).

Watch on YouTube…

📖 PIGEON: Predicting Image Geolocations

On the note of AI being able to geolocate images, check out this research paper that started the conversation. I suspect a new wave of audio/visual investigation tools are just around the corner.

Read the report…

🐦 Google expands the list of supported filetypes in Google Search

Aleksandra Bielska shares an update from Google Search. The filetype: operator now supports extensions such as .csv, .mp4, and more. This will likely spark a whole new list of custom search engines (CSE) and I’m looking forward to it.

Read more on LinkedIn…

🐦 A sizable list of Shodan Dorks updated for 2023

HackGit shares a large list of Shodan Dorks for 2023. If you’re not using Shodan already in OSINT, consider spending the time. It’s not just for technical intelligence, I’ve seen people find tons of exposed datasets that have helped with investigations of all types.

Read more on X…

🐦 Create more believable sock puppets with AI

Cyber Detective shares a list of resources that will help you create more believable sock puppets. This is also the list of resources that will likely be used by adversaries to create many fake accounts for large-scale mis/disinformation campaigns and worse.

Read more on X…

🐦 Find the distance between a camera and an explosion with Python

David from GeoConfirmed shared new research (including a Python script) he’s doing to help investigators find the distance between where an explosion happened and where the video showing the explosion was filmed. It uses the sound delay between the flash and boom of the explosion to estimate.

Read more on X…

✅ That’s it for the free version of The OSINT Newsletter. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support this publication and independent research.

By upgrading to paid, you’ll get access to the following:

📱 2 manual mobile OSINT methods for reverse phone number

🔎 3 OSINT tools for images and social media intelligence

🥸 2 OPSEC tools for enhancing digital privacy

🚀 If you don’t have a paid subscription already, don’t worry there’s a 7-day free trial. If you like what you’re reading, upgrade your subscription. If you can’t, I totally understand. Stay tuned for the geolocation challenge in next week’s issue to get a shot at free access.

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

Subscribe to The OSINT Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

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