The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #80
AI vs AI: Testing Next-Gen AI Generated Images Against AI Image Detectors
👋 Welcome to the 80th 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:
Dodging Misinformation Professionally
Some of the Best PIs in the Business
Methodology Redundancy
YouTube Archiving and Metadata
Trying Out LLM Geolocation
Making Static Data Easier to Find
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⚡ Supercharging OSINT: Collecting Data at Scale with Proxies
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OSINT News
📰 A Guide To Monitoring Conflict Amidst a Sea of Misinformation
This excellent deep dive into military armory is a must read for those looking to investigate warfare online. It covers types of firearms, country flags, group insignias, and even drones! It demonstrates methods like reverse image search as a starting point and how to refine from there.
🎩 H/T: Makepeace Sitlhou
📰 Private Investigator Case Studies: How We Find the Unfindable
10 case studies. 10 opportunities to learn. From searching military records to breach data, Brian shows how you can sometimes think outside of the box to solve a case. They’re each short and concise, more of an inspiration than a how-to.
🎩 H/T: Brian Willingham
📰 Trillions of Posts Go Dark on Facebook – Here's Your Flashlight
Henk Van Ess discusses the latest outage of Facebook search capabilities. I checked and it seems like the issue has been patched; however, this post is an important lesson in having a backup. In this case, Henk’s own tools served as an excellent backup for Facebook’s native search capabilities. After reading this, consider how you will build redundancy in your investigative workflow.
🎩 H/T: Henk van Ess
OSINT Tools
🔎 YouTube Video Finder
YouTube content gets taken down all the time. Searching for videos in archives like the Wayback Machine can be tedious. This tool aggregates several sources for checking video archives online, streamlining this process. Not the perfect tool but a good reminder to remember archives even for video content. You can still access the metadata and other useful information.
🎩 H/T: TheTechRobo
🔎 GeoIntel
LLMs can geolocate! Well, sort of. With a lot of geolocation tools going enterprise-only, consider GeoIntel. Using Gemini’s API (you need a key), you can take a catalog of photos, do step 1 of geolocation (bulk checking), and narrow down from there. Remember, deduction is a valuable skillset in OSINT investigations. You have to narrow the entire planet down to specific areas and narrow from there.
🎩 H/T: Atilla ⌐■_■
🔎 Council Meeting Transcript Search
This tool lets researchers search auto-generated transcripts of Council meetings from authorities across the UK and Ireland. But it’s more than that. It’s an example of making a tool that makes data that’s already available easier to find. If you’re looking to build an OSINT tool that’s actually helpful to the community, ideate from here.
🎩 H/T: Bellingcat
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⚡ AI vs AI: Testing Next-Gen AI Generated Images Against AI Image Detectors
I read a post on LinkedIn showing a next-generation AI generated image. As you’ll see, it looks absolutely real. Not like realistic, I mean real-real. Smudged mirror, messy room, camera flash, awkward angle— a typical teenage selfie. Except the girl doesn’t exist. Despite it being AI-generated, nearly all of the detectors failed to spot the fake. Find out which ones you can trust.
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