The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #71
Vehicle Investigations using License Plates and VIN
👋 Welcome to the 71st issue of The OSINT Newsletter. This issue contains OSINT news, community posts, tactics, techniques, and tools to help you become a better investigator. In this issue, we’ll cover the following:
New abilities to investigate missing persons cases
Techniques for investigating air pollution
Methods for investigating corporate misconduct globally
OSINT tools for emails, IPs, and more
A repository of domains associated with popular websites
A geolocation tool similar to GeoSpy
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⚡ Finding company information by mining public job listings
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OSINT News
📰 OS-Surveillance now provides access to US missing persons data
Missing persons investigations can be complicated. Most of your efforts are spent filtering out content specifically about the missing person report. Investigators rely on face recognition, identifying email addresses, phone numbers, and usernames, and pivoting off of those datapoints to find valuable information. OS-Surveillance has baked a lot of those methods into their app, streamlining this process for investigators.
🎩 H/T: Offensive OSINT
📰 Essential OSINT tools for journalists investigating air pollution
Niche investigative topics are difficult to get started in. If you’re investigating air pollution, for example, which tools do you use? Which datasets are helpful? Where do you get started? This article gives you a crash course on the resources that are available to you across several categories.
🎩 H/T: Renjani Sari
📰 New Free Tools to Track Corporate Misconduct Around the World
Another niche topic, investigating corporate misconduct. Where do I get started? Which tools are available to me? What are the steps? Rowan does a great job explaining his process and the tool(s) he uses.
🎩 H/T: Rowan Philp
OSINT Tools
🔎 Sherlockeye
We have yet another OSINT search engine. Similar to OSINT Industries and Epieos, Sherlockeye gives you the ability to look up specific data points and get high confidence results. I’m really liking the IP search option.
🔎 v2Fly Domain list
v2Fly is designed to help bypass the Great Firewall of the CCP and other censorship. Within the code, though, is a list of domains that are associated with the most popular websites. This can be a valuable resource if you ever need to do a domain lookup, create whitelists of domains, or any other domain-related task.
🔎 Picarta
I was wondering how long it would take for me to find a GeoSpy alternative. Picarta allows you to upload an image and get the approximate coordinates of that image. You don’t need to be law enforcement to use the tool either. I’m excited to test their API.
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⚡ Vehicle Investigations using License Plates and VIN
In the US, the Driver's Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) prohibits the sharing of personal information associated with a plate number or VIN. However, using OSINT methods, we can learn a lot about a vehicle and possibly the owner of it without requiring government-provided information.
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