The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #62
The latest and greatest in OSINT news, tools, tactics, and techniques
👋 Welcome to the 62nd 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.
🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
⚡ Bypassing Reddit API by using JSON view
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 Using Bing Maps for Traffic Cameras
A lot of OSINT is focused on person searches and geolocation. I used to work in a SOC that monitored global events and reported security events to on-site teams. We used a lot of tools to monitor the web for this. Among those tools were traffic cameras. If an incident occurred, we’d try to find a camera near that incident for additional information. Bing Maps has this feature built in. You can also find local versions from government sites.
🎩 H/T: UK OSINT Community
📰 To See, or Not to See: The Ethical and Legal Issues of Using Social Media for Investigative and Intelligence Purposes (2023)
With many high profile cases in the news lately (Luigi Mangione, New Orleans terrorist attack, etc.), there’s a big debate going on about whether or not it’s ethical to publish OSINT gathered about these cases. There is no objectively correct answer. This is what makes conversations about ethics so interesting. In a thread about this topic on LinkedIn, I saw reference to a paper about this topic.
🎩 H/T: Ryan Alison Mason
📰 GeoSpy Vision (Beta)
First came geolocation at scale with very limited information. Now, it’s object recognition within an image at scale. Check out the latest announcement from GeoSpy and the demo for the Vision tool.
🎩 H/T: Daniel Heinen
💡 Solve the Case
If you’re looking for a way to tune your OSINT skill set, consider contributing to Solve the Case. Similar to TraceLabs, there’s a list of active cases that could use your help. Unlike TraceLabs, though, make sure to only provide information that law enforcement can’t obtain through traditional means. I’m pretty sure LE already knows family names, for example. I’m nearly certain they have a list of known addresses. They may not, for example, have email addresses and associated social media profiles linked to those.
Contribute to Solve the Case...
🎩 H/T: Aaron Benzick and the Solve the Case team
OSINT Tools
🔎 LinkedIn Profile Viewer
If you’re logged out of LinkedIn and want a way to view profile information at scale without tipping off the target, give this tool a shot. The free version gives you a partial view into the profile, which is sort of annoying; however, it’s a good workaround in a pinch if you’re generally familiar with the target already.
🎩 H/T: Cyber Detective (Discovery)
🔎 Surveillance Under Surveillance
There are a lot of cameras posted throughout major cities. Some you can view through Shodan, others you have to find through webcam aggregators. Surveillance Under Surveillance leverages hard-to-reach Open Street Maps data to geolocate all cameras.
🔎 Go Search
Go Search is an interesting project that goes beyond generic username searches. It’s faster than Sherlock since it uses Go instead of Python and claims to have less false positives. It also integrates a few APIs (Hudson Rock, Rapid API) for more enrichments.
🎩 H/T: Shaffan Aleem
✅ That’s it for the free version of The OSINT Newsletter. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support this publication and independent research.
By upgrading to paid, you’ll get access to the following:
⚡ Research into using Audio for OSINT (Geolocation)
I’ll share my research into potential use cases of raw audio for OSINT. This includes geolocating specific, unique sounds (i.e. “Mind the Gap” announcements in London metro).
👀 All paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!
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