The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #24
The latest and greatest in OSINT news, tools, tactics, and techniques
👋 Welcome to the 24th 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.
🙏 I wanted to say thank you to all of the new subscribers and those who decided to stick with me beyond issue #23. Over 50 people chose to solve the last issue’s geolocation challenge by replying to this email. There are over 6000 of you, let’s bring that number up!
🚨 The OSINT Newsletter now has enough supporters with paid subscriptions to allow me to hire freelance writers. I’ll be working with a few individuals over the coming months to provide exclusive OSINT content. Thanks again for making this happen.
🗒️ osint.news now redirects to osintnewsletter.com. Somehow, I finally got a shortened URL that matches a project I’m working on. Don’t be scared of osint.news links if you see them!
🏆 Geolocation challenge
In what city was this image taken? What are the specific coordinates?
The first person to provide the correct city gets 1 month of paid access to The OSINT Newsletter for free. The person with the closest coordinates to where the image was taken from will also get 1 month of paid access.
Bonus: the person who provides the best writeup for how they geolocated the image (with the right location) will also get 1 month of free access and will have their writeup featured in the next newsletter issue.
🙋 Reply to this email with your answer; winners will be announced on Friday.
🪃 In case you missed recent newsletters, here are a few links to help you catch up.
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 A Real OSINT Case: Uncovering a Hacker Group
Social Links investigates a hacker group that specializes in stealing personal identifiable information (PII). Explore the journey from phishing emails to hacked websites and how to pivot from data to identity.
📰 OSINT Round-Up of Russia-Based High-Profile Cybercriminals
If you’re interested in Russia from a cyber threat intelligence perspective, check out this article. The author explores a Russian ransomware gang (Conti) and how they’re involved in the fashion industry. It also shows how they were able to identify a few of the gang members.
Read more on Security Boulevard…
📰 Cryptocurrency — OSINT challenge (with solutions) PT3
If you’re interested in learning more about cryptocurrency investigations, check out this article. The author steps through an OSINT challenge involving a contract address and the flow of transactions to and from that address. They continue on to advanced topics such as token minting.
📰 Advanced Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): Types, Techniques, and Tools
This article explores the various different forms of intelligence collection and what tools and resources you can use to explore each. This is a good primer to expand your knowledge of a few different industries such as health, legal, environmental, and brand intelligence.
📰 OSINT For Product Managers – The Future
As an intelligence analyst turned product manager turned intelligence/product hybrid myself, this article is the first I’ve seen that explores the connection. Noël explores the overlap in industries and how you can use OSINT skills to excel at product management.
🚨 If there’s a blog post, news article, or any other content you’d like to see in this newsletter, reply to this email with a link and why you think the community would enjoy it. I’m always looking for great new content.
OSINT Community
📺 2 OSINT mapping tools you need to know!
Have you heard of Wikimapia or Open Infrastructure Map? If not, watch this video. Gary steps through how you can use these two tools for geolocation.
📺 Keynote | Bridging the Gap: Integrating Digital Forensics with Open-Source Intelligence
If you’re in digital forensics and want to get into open source intelligence or vice versa, don’t miss this keynote from Matt Edmondson. Matt is a DFIR/OSINT hybrid and his insights on bridging the gap between the two. I particularly like the bit about mobile OSINT.
🐦 A detailed checklist for OSINT investigations into businesses
Techjournalisto shares an infographic that is a good reference for doing OSINT investigations into businesses. If you were to follow every step in their diagram and had even beginner analysis skills, you’d produce a very valuable intelligence report.
🖥️ The Number 1 StartMe page for OSINT in September
StartMe is essentially Pinterest for nerds. For the OSINT nerds, it’s very popular. This page is the most popular OSINT page for the month of September. It includes resources for nearly all possible data points. Bookmark this page to possibly get unstuck in future investigations.
🧠 What I talk about when I talk about OSINT
This opinion piece on open source intelligence is definitely worth a read. It gives a different perspective on the OSINT/OSINF conversation as well as why OSINT is different than traditional disciplines like SIGINT and MASINT.
✅ 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:
🌎 The latest in geolocation research from Jake Creps and GONZO
🔎 3 OSINT tools for phone numbers, TikTok, and leaked databases
📖 2 resources for cyber threat intelligence and open source intelligence
🚀 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.
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