The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #55
The latest and greatest in OSINT news, tools, tactics, and techniques
👋 Welcome to the 55th 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.
🚨 There will be no OSINT Tool Tuesday this week. As many may know, I’m in the middle of moving and have been spending most of my free time moving furniture, painting walls, and doing the typical move-into-a-house routine. I’ll be back at it next week; thanks for understanding.
🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 Pompompurin and BreachForums
During the shutdown of BreachForums, a popular forum for selling credentials, leaks, and other illegal content, Arden did an investigation on Pompompurin, the forum admin. After some time, he published his investigation.
It is an excellent read for an OSINT case study.
🎩 H/T: Adren
📰 Alex Lozano shares a list of OSINT webinars
If you’re looking for some quality OSINT training on modern topics, give this list of OSINT webinars a look. Alex summarizes quality content that you can use to sharpen your skills.
🎩 H/T: Alex Lozano
📰 Jess B shares Bing search tips for OSINT
Google Search results are diminishing with the focus on AI. I’ve used Bing and Yandex more lately than I did last year. Jess gives an overview of Bing as a search engine from an OSINT perspective.
🎩 H/T: Jess B
📺 Jupyter Notebooks In Google Colab: Bellingcat Tech Series
Jupyter Notebooks are an excellent way to learn to code and also an amazing way to share your code with others. In this series, Bellingcat talks about Jupyter Notebooks in Google Colab and how you can get started.
🎩 H/T: Aiganysh Aidarbekova
OSINT Tools
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🔎 Webcam Pulse Detector
This project was interesting to me for two reasons. First, you can use this to detect fake videos by determining if a pulse can be detected. Second, this can be used against you and compromise your OPSEC.
🎩 H/T: Tristan Hearn
🔎 H.I.V.E
This OSINT multi-tool allows you to put an ‘interface’ around your favorite API keys including Truecaller, Shodan, IntelX, and more. It allows you to use several methods in a single tool.
🎩 H/T: Shad0w-ops
🔎 APK Analyzer
I was asked recently in an AMA thread how you can verify browser extensions before installing them. On a similar note, APK Analyzer allows you to investigate Android apps before using them. In a future issue, I’ll discuss how to download APKs and investigate potentially malicious Android apps.
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Hi Jake
I am a subscriber to your news letter about OSINT and I am impressed at how throughout you are each week making a solid newsletter.
So I think Face Recognition OSINT would be perk your interest.
I run an OSINT group, but we do face recognition to track down criminals, help stop sex trafficking etc. and work with Private Investigators on large face database projects.
What we don’t do: Track down people on OnlyFans or find people ex-girl friends.
But we do have a community version of our Face Recognition software for ( journalists and Students) who are interest in doing real face-recognition and reverse geo-location work on real-cases.
Our team consists of me ( lead programmer, 1 marketing person and 1 journalist) .
We would like to reach a broader audience of people who use face recognition for good ( as 90% of the requests we get are to violate peoples privacy) .
And we only work with (PI, Anti-human trafficking organizations etc) and am wondering would your newsletter be an avenue to serious users?
www.facemri.com