👋 Welcome to the 83rd 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 the content covered in this issue:
OSINT to Train AI
Google Maps OSINT Methods
New OSINT Newsletter
Discord OSINT
Domain OSINT
Localized OSINT
🚨 Issue #82 of the newsletter was a free issue and is available to all subscribers. In this week’s podcast, I’ll discuss issue #82 and #83 (this one).
🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
⚡ Dorking for Dummies: Search Engine OSINT That Goes Beyond Google
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 The Future of Intelligence Is Open
This article made me change the way I think about OSINT slightly. We need to train LLMs on quality data. A lot of data is hard to find, even for massive scrapers like those deployed by OpenAI and Google. Open source intelligence is a national asset. It’s time to start treating it as such.
Read on Foreign Policy… | No Paywall
🎩 H/T: Greg Levesque
📰 Finding the exact date and time a Google Maps review was posted
You find a business on Google Maps. There are hundreds of reviews. You want to construct a timeline to see who might have been at that business during a time/date of interest. Use this method to construct an exact timeline and increase the fidelity of your data.
🎩 H/T: Yoni
📰 OSINT Field Notes #1
I’ll stop mentioning Benjamin Strick in this newsletter once he stops putting out great content. Ben just launched a Substack newsletter. I’ve recommended it on my Substack. Subscribe to it. Thank me later.
🎩 H/T: Benjamin Strick
OSINT Tools
🔎 doxcord
UTM parameters are often a goldmine for OSINT. Doxcord scans Discord servers you’re in, extracts social media links with UTM parameters, and provides a list. For example, you can determine what type of device a user has based on the UTM parameter from a Twitter (X) URL they share. There’s a lot more to discover if you know the keys.
🎩 H/T: Pierre Ceberio
🔎 Validin
Valadin is a DNS intelligence platform. They have a community edition. If you’re often reversing domains, check this tool out. A lot like it have gone enterprise-only.
🔎 Google Search Localization
If you want your Google Search results to match your area of interest, check out this browser extension. For example, if you’re investigating a missing person that lives in a different country than you, you can change your locale to theirs and continue your searching. You can even modify language with ease.
✅ 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:
⚡ Monitoring Live Webcams in a Single Pane of Glass
There are thousands of live webcams online. If there’s a significant event that’s worth monitoring, flipping through dozens of live feeds isn’t ideal. What if you could pick all the webcams you were interested in, put them in a single pane of glass to monitor, and turn them into an intelligence capability. Follow along with me in this issue as I create a tool to solve this use case.
👀 All paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!
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