The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #78
Search in a Post-AI World
👋 Welcome to the 78th issue of The OSINT Newsletter. This issue contains OSINT news, community posts, tactics, techniques, and tools to help you become a better investigator. Here’s an overview of what’s in this issue:
Instagram Launches a Snap Map Clone
Validating Gmail Addresses
Analyzing New Phishing Techniques
Mega.nz Search Engine
AI Agent Search Engine
Reverse Tattoo Search?
🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
⚡ Using VS Code and Copilot for OSINT Investigations
🎙️ If you prefer to listen, here’s a link to the podcast instead.
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 Instagram launched a Snap Map–like tool
Gen Z is a location-sharing generation. Tools like Snap Map showed incredible value for OSINT investigators, particularly during major events. Instagram rolled out a similar feature, allowing their users to geotag their content and have it show up on a map. You can use this in investigations.
This is also a very large privacy concern. This content will be scraped and stored at scale by governments and corporations. Make sure you have the featured disabled if you’re an Instagram user.
Read on LinkedIn | Read on Meta
🎩 H/T: Amy Enz
📰 How to Validate a Gmail Address Ethically
If you have a Gmail address and want to determine if it’s in use or not, Ritu from Forensic OSINT shows you a way to do this within Google’s services, avoiding any third party tool that may or may not violate ToS.
🗒️ She shows you how to do it with Google Calendar. You can also do this within Google Sheets by hovering over an email in any cell.
🎩 H/T: Ritu Gill
📰 Phishing with Japanese Characters
There’s a Japanese character that looks like this ん. It can be used scammers in a clever way to make phishing URLs look legitimate. You can add them to a subdomain to impersonate other websites. Let’s say you want to impersonate Facebook. You can do something like this.
🎩 H/T: Michel Coene
OSINT Tools
🔎 Meawfy
Meawfy is a search engine that looks at Mega.nz files. If you’re not familiar with Mega.nz, it’s like DropBox. It’s notorious for storing of combo lists and other leak data. If you’re searching for something like that, here’s an example. There’s a lot of valuable information you can find here.
🎩 H/T: Mario Santella (for sharing)
🔎 Agent.ai
Agent.ai is a collection of AI agents that will do specific tasks for you. You need to sign up to use it but the agents are free to try. One example is the Company Research Agent. You enter a domain and it pulls a treasure trove of data for you.
🔎 TattooDo
If you’re investigating someone who has tattoos, that’s a unique identifier. Unique identifiers can be a pivot point. This tool doesn’t help you pivot but it helps you think creatively about your investigations. I’ve done missing persons investigations where tattoos were a critical way to verify if evidence collected matched the missing person.
🎩 H/T: Cyb Detective (for sharing)
💡 Aidan Raney mentioned this on LinkedIn recently. He shared the idea of creating a “reverse tattoo” search engine, similar to how face recognition search engines work. You’d enter a tattoo and find matches to other content that’s similar. He mentioned sites like TattooDo as the training data. While I think this is a good idea, we need to at some point ask ourselves what the ethical limits to having a reverse search for everything are.
Before you know it, we’re going to index fingerprints and reverse search them.
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⚡ Search in a Post-AI World
A lot of my content is very technical. Not all of my readers are very technical. You asked and I listened. In this issue, we’re going to take another look at search, a critical part of the intelligence cycle (collection), updated for the modern era post-AI.
This isn’t more Google Fu content, don’t worry.
👀 All paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!
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