The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #50
The latest and greatest in OSINT news, tools, tactics, and techniques
👋 Welcome to the 50th 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’ll be working on the OSINT Resources for Phone Numbers page this week to populate a Phone Number roadmap for OSINT Tool Tuesday.
Next up is Zehef, an email OSINT multi-tool that has several applications for investigations across multiple industries.
Many people have reached out asking where the paid content is on this issue. Because of email character limits, I’ve frequently had to cut content down in size so it fits in a single email. In the future, I’ll be segmenting paid content into different posts, such as OSINT Tool Tuesday, so I can add much more detail. Sorry for the confusion.
🪃 If you missed last week’s newsletters, here are some links to catch up.
⚡ Learn how to use GHunt for OSINT Investigations (Paid)
⚡ The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #49
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 How I tracked an IT & Security Engineer US DoD Contractor working for Serco in support of a US Base in Europe
Tactical OSINT Analyst shares an OSINT case study using an app called Sports Tracker in addition to LinkedIn to find more information that should not be disclosed but is available.
🎩 H/T: Tactical OSINT Analyst
📰 NixIntel updates his OSINT Start Me page
StartMe pages are a pain to maintain. OSINT resources come and go daily or weekly. Steve Harris (NixIntel) updated theirs recently to only list the latest and greatest. Check it out!
🎩 H/T:
📰 New Facebook ID numbers for pages?
Plessas Expert Networks shares their research on new identifiers for Facebook pages. They noticed that the legacy IDs were no longer working using several search methods. The key takeaway is the discovery of the "associated_page_id" as a reliable identifier for pages, which restored full search capability.
🎩 H/T: Kirby Plessas
📰 OSINTerdam #7
If you’re in Europe, OSINTerdam has another event on April 20th. The event will go over an introduction to OSINT, mining for meaning: exploring Narrative Intelligence with OSINT, and a [REDACTED] topic from OSINT Industries (these guys…).
🎩 H/T: Soxoj, Fabio Daniele, Megadose/Palenath, Nathaniel Fried
OSINT Tools
🌟 Sponsor: Open Measures (formerly SMAT)
Open Measures democratizes tools that identify online extremism and defend against offline harm. Search for and contextualize the spread of extremism and disinformation on social networks like Telegram, Gab, Rumble, and many more. Create keyword-based visualizations to track trends on their platform.
🔎 Sowsearch
As mentioned above in the blog post from Plessas Expert Networks, Sowsearch is a tool you can use to do advanced searches on Facebook in the post-graph search era. This isn’t a new tool but is useful for those who may not be familiar with it.
🎩 H/T: s0wdust
🔎 FEAT
In the last issue of The OSINT Newsletter, I mentioned the Google Fact Checker search tool. FEAT is an open source tool on GitHub that uses this data for deeper analysis into mis/disinformation. Using the API instead of the UI, GONZO was able to get past the data restrictions to show more data in one view.
🎩 H/T: GONZO
🥸 Chaff
If you’re really sensitive to masking your online traffic from third-party observers, consider using Chaff. Chaff will obfuscate your web traffic by generating random traffic on websites you specify. This will modify your “pattern of life” to increase your privacy.
🔎 Google Maps Scraper
Google Maps has a treasure trove of data about businesses, landmarks, infrastructure, and more. One issue with Google Maps, though, is that the information is hard to collect in an automated way. Google Maps Scraper helps you gather information at scale from Google Maps, making your investigation into specific areas of interest easier.
🎩 H/T: Georgios Komninos
✅ 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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OSINT Tool Tuesday
All paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!
🚀 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.
hi, have you collected all the tools recommendded here at one page?
Always great resources. Thanks.