The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #43
Create a bookmarklet to extract a social media user IDs in one click
👋 Welcome to the 43rd 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.
🚨 The print issues of The OSINT Newsletter have arrived! Some of you might have already received updates that your order has shipped out. Please bear with me as I am packing and shipping all of these myself. I’m trying to get these all shipped out by the end of the week.
🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
⚡ Use machine learning and face recognition to analyze videos at scale
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 Open Source in Short: Retracing a UK Street 100 Years On
This topic has been fascinating to me. Using geolocation techniques to plot where antique photos were taken is a cool way to test your abilities in OSINT while providing a lot of value to society. Read as Bellingcat shows you a case study covering several methods.
🎩 H/T: Annique Mossou
📰 Guidelines for Public Interest OSINT Investigations
This extensive free guide from OBSINT is an excellent guide that steps you through the intelligence cycle for open source investigations. This guide has a European lens but much of the principles can be applied to other regions and use cases.
OSINT Community
📺 AI-Generated Fakes: How to spot them, how they're made, and how they have been used to mislead
Ben shows you methods you can use to identify AI-generated images. With the rise of AI image creation, we’re seeing more and more examples of viral videos on conflict, political events, and other topics using fake images or videos to convince a large audience of misinformation. Ben talks about this in detail.
🎩 H/T: Benjamin Strick
📺 Command Line Fundamentals: Bellingcat Tech Series
So many OSINT tools operate on the command line. If you want to level up from basic to intermediate or from intermediate to advanced, it’s certainly a skill set you need to build. Bellingcat shows you how in this new series, starting with Windows.
🎩 H/T: Galen Greich
🐦 A simple Python scraper for infinite scroll websites
This post is from December 2023; however, just because I missed it last year doesn’t mean it’s not worth a read. Infinite scroll websites, like Telegram channels, are valuable for OSINT and may be scraped to archive information that’s valuable to an investigation. Not all out-of-the-box tools can do this well or consistently; learn how to make your own.
🎩 H/T: Conspirador Norteño
OSINT Tools
🌟 Sponsor: Authentic8
OSINTUp: a virtual skill-sharing event
Thursday, Feb. 22, join OSINT experts like Micah Hoffman of MyOSINT.Training and Cynthia Hetherington of OSMOSISCon for a day of FREE, virtual tips and resources to further your open-source tradecraft.
🔎 Tweet Machine
If you’ve ever used Wayback Tweets, you’ll know it’s possible to get deleted tweets from an active user or all tweets for a suspended account using the Wayback Machine. If you want to do this with the command line or harvest this code to build your own tool, consider Tweet Machine, a bash script to query the Wayback Machine.
🎩 H/T: Paul Jeremiah B
🔎 EDGAR
EDGAR is a database maintained by the Security and Exchanges Commission (SEC) in the United States. This database has a treasure trove of information regarding corporate and financial data. It’s historically been difficult to access programmatically and many vendors charge for their solution. Bellingcat created a tool that you can use to access this data for free.
🎩 H/T: George Dyer, Galen Greich
🔎 OSINT Resources by Country
Sometimes it’s difficult to context switch when you’re doing an investigation into a country you’re not familiar with. In those cases, consult the OSINT Resources by Country list on GitHub. There’s a ton of information on this list that help you get started.
🎩 H/T: Adk
✅ 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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⚡ Create a bookmarklet to extract a social media user IDs in one click
Follow along as I create a single bookmarklet that can universally fetch the user ID for several social media accounts account. Bookmarklet code included!
👀 All paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!
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