The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #60
The latest and greatest in OSINT tools, tactics, and techniques
👋 Welcome to the 60th 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.
🚨 This is the last newsletter of the year. Moving into 2025, this publication will come out biweekly. Later, in the spring, I’m looking to relaunch the podcast. Thanks again for subscribing and supporting me this year.
🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
⚡ Using the BlueSky API for Advanced Search Functionality
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 A Free OSINT Lesson: Sometimes It's Easier Just to Make a Phone Call
In many ways, OSINT methodology has become very complicated. Gone are the days of everything being wide open, ready for data collection at scale; however, sometimes old tricks are new tricks.
Analyst Note: Take special care to maintain proper OPSEC. If you’re regularly doing OSINT-related projects, you should already have an alternate phone number you can use. You can also use VOIP phone numbers for this use case (where normally I’d not recommend it).
Read more on Bullshit Hunting…
🎩 H/T: MJ Barnias
📰 Getting Started in OSINT the Right Way
If you’re new to OSINT and want to build a portfolio or gain valuable experience, read this post on LinkedIn for options to get started.
TL;DR: Do a full data privacy deep dive on your friends and family, showing them areas where their information is exposed on how to fix it. This, and other ideas.
🎩 H/T: Aidan Raney
📰 An OSINT Deep Dive into the Luigi Mangione Case
OSINT Industries teases their new tool, Palette, while exploring the publicly available information about Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the high profile UnitedHealthcare case. What looks like an OSINT Industries-powered map tool (similar to Maltego), I’m looking forward to contributing to transforms on this platform when possible.
This is a good read-ahead for the paid portion of this week’s newsletter. If active investigations about popular figures like Luigi Mangione are not your thing or you ethically don’t align with this practice, this post is not for you.
🎩 H/T: Nathaniel Fried
OSINT Tools
🔎 RememberAll
Anyone who has tried to use AI either in the browser or via API understands the memory limitations. Stay in a conversation for too long, all of a sudden the machine has no idea what you’re talking about anymore. RememberAll is a long term memory solution that’s available for tool developers working with AI.
🎩 H/T: Andrew Pierno
🔎 Reddit Answers
Not necessarily a tool, but a source that should be on your radar. Soon, Reddit will launch Reddit Answers. It seems to be a chatbot that lets you query specifically into a subreddit and only receive information from that subreddit.
The details are a bit sparse; however, this could be an excellent way to expedite research across subreddits in the future.
🔎 SEC EDGAR for Executive Protection Costs
I’ve mentioned this tool in a previous issue; however, after the UnitedHealthcare case, it’s important to revisit this. All executive expenses are required to be reported to the SEC for publicly traded companies in the US, including security. Using EDGAR, you can look up UnitedHealthcare and investigate their DEF 14A form that details these expenditures. As of April, there don’t appear to be any listed. It’s also worth looking at the 8K form if available.
✅ 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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⚡ Building a Face Recognition Tool that Works in Your Browser
Understanding the upside and limitations of face recognition through the Luigi Mangione case
👀 All paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!
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