Every website has an owner. Every owner leaves traces. And every trace is an opportunity.
This episode covers Issues 93 and 94 of The OSINT Newsletter and focuses on two core realities of modern OSINT: why domains remain one of the most powerful investigative entry points, and how real investigators evolve their methods, tools, and careers over time.
In Episode 12 of the OSINT Podcast, host Jake Creps breaks down Domain OSINT from first principles, showing how a single URL can unravel ownership, infrastructure, intent, and connected activity. Alongside that, Jake reflects on how OSINT methods are discovered, why most of them decay, and how his own path from intelligence analyst to product manager reshaped how he thinks about collection, analysis, and tooling.
The episode also covers OSINT news, emerging risks in large-scale surveillance systems, agentic AI, and several practical tools that investigators are using right now.
Highlights include:
🌐 Domain OSINT: It’s Free Real Estate – why domains are one of the most overlooked investigative assets, what they can reveal about ownership, infrastructure, behaviour, and intent, and how to move from a single address to an entire network.
🧱 Beginner Tools for Domain OSINT – practical walkthroughs of WHOIS, DNS enumeration, reverse IP search, historical site analysis, and email infrastructure checks, all using free or freemium tools.
🔁 Turning Patterns Into Pivots – how hosting reuse, domain age, registrar choice, and site history expose relationships that privacy protection can’t hide.
🧪 A Domain OSINT Case Study – following a suspicious “global services” website from registration details to hosting behaviour and archived versions, and showing how fast red flags accumulate when you know where to look.
🧠 How New OSINT Methods Are Discovered – an inside look at how investigators actively and passively find new techniques, why most methods have a short shelf life, and why sharing sources and methods matters more than hoarding tools.
🧑💻 From Analyst to Product Manager – Jake’s personal journey from intelligence analysis into tech, the concept of “Customer Zero,” and why analysts often make the best product leaders in OSINT-adjacent companies.
🛠 Building Tools vs Doing Analysis – the tension between creating collection tooling and maintaining analytical rigor, and why many investigators naturally drift toward engineering without realizing it.
🕵️ OSINT News and Emerging Risks – coverage of OSINT resources for Qatar, crowdsourced surveillance systems and privacy failures, and the growing reality of investigating humans operating behind LLM-driven content.
🔎 New and Noteworthy Tools – including Dorkwright for homegrown SERP scraping, Pic Detective as a reverse image search complement, and Think-Pol for Reddit investigation in a hostile API environment.
Throughout the episode, the emphasis stays on fundamentals over hype, behaviour over branding, and understanding systems rather than blindly trusting tools.
If you want to get better at tracing ownership, uncovering infrastructure, and building an OSINT skillset that survives tool churn and career pivots, Episode 12 is for you.
References
OSINT Newsletter – Issue 93
OSINT Newsletter – Issue 94
Dorkwright | Pic Detective | Think-Pol
OSINT of Qatar | Waze Crowdsourced Surveillance | OpenClaw (Moltbot)
