The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #72
Creating a Gmail Honeypot for OSINT
👋 Welcome to the 72nd 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 newsletter we will cover:
New OSINT sources for learning
Supply chain investigations
Using LLMs to turn HTML pages into structured data
Improving OPSEC with off-browser privacy
Telegram OSINT
🚨 The OSINT Newsletter now has over 24,000 subscribers! Thanks for supporting the publication. The return of the podcast is just around the corner (this summer).
🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
⚡ Vehicle Investigations using License Plates and VIN
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 Craig Silverman Launches Indicator
Craig decided to go indie! His great Digital Investigations newsletter is now a full publication with the support of a cofounder. He and I spoke about him launching this a month or longer ago and I’m excited that he pulled the trigger. If you’re looking for an OSINT publication with a journalistic lens, make sure to subscribe.
🎩 H/T: Craig Silverman
📰 Investigating How Illegal Gold Gets Into the Legitimate Supply Chain
This is an exciting supply chain-related investigation that exposed me to new datasets that I wasn’t familiar with:
Sayari (I knew this one and highly recommend it)
🎩 H/T: Fabian Federl
📰 Aaron Roberts Launches OSINT Portal
If you’re familiar with Start Me pages, this is that on steroids. If you’re looking for OSINT tools, training, or need to brainstorm intelligence requirements, check out OSINT Portal. This would be incredibly useful for a TraceLabs CTF. You can enter a selector in its Dashboard, such as an email address, and it’ll give you a ton of resources you can use to reverse search it.
🎩 H/T: Aaron Roberts
OSINT Tools
🔎 ScrapeGraphAI
ScrapeGraphAI allows you to input a URL, provide a prompt, and receive a structured, consistent JSON of the information you’ve requested. It has a generous free model with the option to scale if you find it valuable. I tested this with several HTML pages that had tabled information and other useful data and it turned it into a nicely organized JSON quickly. It also was able to keep this format across several, similar pages without the typical AI variation.
🔎 ZeroTrace
If you’re looking to boost your data privacy and OPSEC, consider ZeroTrace. It routes all of your system’s network traffic through Tor, not just your browser traffic. If you’re using any application that interacts with the internet, they may not be communicating privately if you rely on Tor.
🎩 H/T: Sreeraj
🔎 TeleGraphite
TeleGraphite allows you to extract and save posts from public Telegram channels. You can fetch posts from multiple channels at the same time. It’ll also save media and dedupe posts for you. It’s a really nice out of the box, turn-key solution. All you need is a Telegram API key.
🎩 H/T: Hamody We
✅ 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:
⚡ Creating a Gmail Honeypot for OSINT
Learn how to configure a Gmail account to passively collect content, analyze its senders, and gather insights about online activity.
👀 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.
🚨 The OSINT Newsletter offers a free premium subscription to all members of law enforcement. To upgrade your subscription, please reach out to LEA@osint.news from your official law enforcement email address.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The OSINT Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.