The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #92
How I Discover New OSINT Methods
👋 Welcome to the 92nd 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 a summary of what’s in this issue:
Sharing sources and methods for high profile investigations
Privacy risks in mobile ad data
Automating large file analysis with AIWhisperer
A user friendly, beginner friendly OSINT tool directory
Behind the curtain on LLM inputs
Username OSINT with image extraction
🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
⚡ The Investigator’s Best Friend: OSINT With AI
Let’s get started. ⬇️
OSINT News
📰 Analysing Footage of Minneapolis ICE Shooting
If you caught the last episode of the podcast, I talked about sharing methods you used in high profile cases to help enrich the OSINT community. Here’s an example. No doxxing. Just sources and methods.
🎩 H/T: Jake Godin
📰 Your Phone is a Tracking Device, and the Government (and Others) are Buying and Using the Data to Find You
A tale as old as time. Companies are getting a hold of your mobile information, often through advertisement networks and other mobile applications, aggregating it, and selling it to the government (or worse). If you aren’t familiar with this risk, read up on it here.
Read on Tate’s Online Safety Community…
🎩 H/T: Tate Jarrow
📰 Introducing AIWhisperer. Feed massive files to AI with less data exposed
I’ve run into this problem; you’ve run into this problem. You upload an attachment to your favorite LLM and it says the attachment is too large. You have to find a way to break it into smaller chunks. That sucks. Also, you have to redact information you don’t want uploaded to the cloud. AIWhisperer does both of these for you at the same time. Enjoy.
🎩 H/T: Henk Van Ess
OSINT Tools
🔎 OSINT Investigator’s Toolkit
This is a beginner-friendly collection of OSINT tools that features both free and paid tools. It’s another directory; however, it has a search engine which makes tools easier to find. If you’re new to investigations, there’s a lot of staples here.
🔎 LeakHub
Warning: This tool is pretty niche. If you’re curious about how LLMs work behind the scenes, LeakHub shows you the guidelines LLMs have to follow when fulfilling your request. The web page is missing an description but their GitHub page has more details. This is useful because the better you understand the inputs, the better you can control the outputs.
🎩 H/T: pliny
🔎 The Big Brother
This is a username tool on steroids. Not only does it fetch profiles with matching usernames, it also extracts images from those profiles and provides you with search engine results for those images. I’d love to see this tool integrate OLlama for more analysis, though.
🎩 H/T: Chadi
🏁 Missing Christmas Challenge
No one has solved last weeks CTF and so we will not be revealing the answers. This weeks challenge is a lot easier, a simple geolocation challenge.
🪃 If you missed the last CTF, here’s a link to catch up.
✅ 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:
⚡ How I Discover New OSINT Methods
Follow along as I show you how I discover new methods both in collection and analysis. I have a heavy bias towards the former, though. Use these methods to build your own tools or use them for good like in missing persons investigations.
👀 All paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!
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