The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #26
The latest and greatest in OSINT news, tools, tactics, and techniques
👋 Welcome to the 26th 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.
🙏 Thank you to all the participants in last week’s geolocation challenge, two people received 30 days of paid access at no charge for their efforts. I’d also like to thank those who have been contributing to this resurgence in OSINT content online. It’s good to see us coming through after the recent diaspora.
🚨 I’ve decided to move the OSINT Tools into the free preview of The OSINT Newsletter moving forward. Now that there are more detailed OSINT guides from me and other OSINT contributors behind the paywall, I wanted to provide more value for free subscribers.
🏆 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 write-up for how they geolocated the image (with the right location) will also get 1 month of free access and will have their write-up featured in the next newsletter issue.
🙋 Reply to this email with your answer; winners will be announced on Friday (or Saturday).
For those of you reading this on Substack or for those who subscribed after this issue was released, use the Substack comment section instead.
🪃 In case you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 Resources for facial recognition, identification & reverse face search
In this article, Matt shows you 15 different tools you can use for facial recognition, identification, and reverse search. From Clearview AI to PimEyes, this shows you a range of consumer to enterprise tools you can possibly use for your investigations.
📰 Mastering the Puzzle of International Phone Numbers
If you’re doing investigations into international phone numbers, give this guide a quick read. Alisa walks you through several use cases and insights when looking into phone numbers from various countries.
📰 Mastering Military OSINT: A Comprehensive Guide for the Modern Analyst in Military Intelligence
Open source intelligence has been undervalued in government sectors over the last 20 years due to various factors from dogma to comparative value in relation to traditional intelligence disciplines. We’ve seen a slow uptick in the significance of this data source in the public sector. This article discusses OSINT from a military perspective.
📰 OSINT Quick Tips: 2 Simple Methods of Getting Around Twitter’s Annoying Login Wall
There have been a lot of changes to Twitter this year. It’s not even Twitter anymore! Griffin shows you how to bypass some of the annoying restrictions they’ve put in place that prevent you from gathering open source intelligence.
📰 How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet
Wired originally published this article but later took it down. Their reasoning for taking it down was saying “it didn’t meet their standards” but I call BS because they likely have a rigorous editing process at a newspaper so large. In the event they were pressured to take it down (speculation), here’s that article in the Wayback Machine.
OSINT Community
📺 You need to know this Weibo OSINT Trick
I first saw this tip on the Curiosity OSINT forum (invite only). I asked the author if they’d be open to writing a newsletter issue on it, but I haven’t heard a response. Fortunately, a YouTube video emerged describing this technique in detail. TLDR: You can reverse an image on Weibo to the person who posted it by analyzing the image URL and using open-source tools to decode it.
🐦 TraceLabs shares an update to their OSINT VM
TraceLabs updated their OSINT virtual machine (VM) with updates from Obsidian and contributions from the OSINT community.
🐦 Benjamin Strick writes in HVCK Magazine
Ben talks about information warfare in India, Indonesia, China, and the US in the latest issue of HVCK Magazine. I’m surprised but excited to see him contribute. Ben is always creating S-tier quality content.
🐦 Open Source Intelligence Discussion
Michael Bond hosted an OSINT discussion on X where over 2000 people tuned in. There’s a lack of OSINT audio content out there and this is a great way to stay in tune. I may or may not be trying to fill this gap next spring!
🐦 Navigating Ethical Dilemmas in OSINT
Bellingcat posted a thread in the middle of September that I missed talking through the ethical dilemmas investigators face in OSINT. From exposure to violent or graphic content to risks to operational security, this is a great read for those new and old in the field.
OSINT Tools
🔎 MetaDetective
MetaDetective easily grabs, sorts, and shows file info, even for specific file types. From who did it and when, to links, software stuff, and GPS data, it helps with cyber investigations.
🖥️ OSINT Earth
OSINT Earth is a project that looks promising. It currently contains a table of different OSINT sources for people and business lookups. There are 7 pages of different sources, and many of them are international.
🔎 TEx
TEx is a Telegram Explorer tool created to help Researchers, Investigators, and Law Enforcement Agents Collect and Process the Huge Amount of Data Generated from Criminal, Fraud, Security, and other Telegram Groups.
🔎 Disserv
Disserv is a Javascript tool that allows you to (try to) identify a discord server ID. The ReadMe also mentions several other tips for investigating Discord, including looking up User IDs and more.
✅ That’s it for the free version of The OSINT Newsletter. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support this publication and independent research.
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🥷 Learn how I went from Twitter/X Community Notes research to finding an internal search API you can use for scraping.
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