The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #49
The latest and greatest in open source intelligence news, tools, tactics, and techniques
👋 Welcome to the 49th 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.
🚨 OSINT Tool Tuesday kicks off tomorrow for paid subscribers. These will be a series of mini-tutorials for popular, free open source intelligence tools.
I’ll kick things off by creating new sections on osintnewsletter.com for categories like email, phone number, username, domain, IP address, etc. These will contain a list of tools for each category that I’ve personally tested and rated.
Then, I’ll dive into each tool week by week to make sure you’re up to speed on the latest and greatest. These tutorials will also include use cases so it won’t just be a how-to guide.
If you’re interested, here’s a 50% discount to join the club. I’m looking forward to it.
🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 Chatter on Rumble about Upcoming Solar Eclipse
There’s a solar eclipse happening today. The great people at Open Measures used their data to analyze mis/disinformation about it on Rumble. What they found might make you laugh or it might make you worried.
🎩 H/T: Open Measures
Read on Open Measure’s Substack…
📰 Rare Drone Footage of North Korea
A drone video of a North Korean city, Sinuiju, was posted on Reddit. Ben Strick created a thread to analyze the video to see what we can learn from it.
🎩 H/T: Benjamin Strick
📰 Finding AI-generated (deepfake) faces in the wild
LinkedIn is home to a lot of fake accounts. You’ll often see a GAN-imaged profile picture in the comments of popular posts. AI researcher Gonzalo Porcile posted some insight into what they’re doing about it on the LinkedIn blog.
🎩 H/T: Gonzalo Aniano Porcile
📰 An OSINT Case Study into a Backdoor Author
GONZO created a beautiful infographic highlighting the steps he took in an investigation into a backdoor author. Pivoting from a GitHub profile to an email address, GONZO was able to link to several accounts including ones with different names based on common activity.
🎩 H/T: GONZO
📰 An OPSEC and OSINT Warning for Customer-Driven Subdomain Usage
BushidoToken sends a friendly reminder that you shouldn’t use customer names as subdomains because these can be looked up quite easily. This can be a very useful method for competitive intelligence, though.
🎩 H/T: BushidoToken
OSINT Tools
🔎 Chiasmodon
Chiasmodon is an OSINT multi-tool that has several powerful options. It allows you to deep dive into: domains, Google Play Store apps, email, username, passwords, and more. The project is early on but is very ambitious.
🔎 Google Fact Check Tools
If you’re doing research online about a specific person or topic, it’s easy to fall victim to mis/disinformation. One tool you can use to better inform your research is Google Fact Check Tools. It allows you to search by topic or person to see what information has already been verified.
🔎 Astica AI
Astica AI creates multiple free tools using artificial intelligence. For OSINT applications, check our their Vision AI section. You can use it to detect faces or objects in images, use OCR, and more.
💡 You can split videos into frames and run those frames into Astica for face/object analysis.
✅ That’s it for the free version of The OSINT Newsletter. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support this publication and independent research.
🚀 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. Be on the lookout for promotions throughout the year.
I am a subscriber but I don't see anything after the Free section on the email or in the App. Am I missing something?