31–40 of 59 posts
I never liked this term. Why is the term "Open Source" used to refer to publicly available information? Something like "PAT" would have been a better acronym: Public Available Information. Do we refer to street dogs as open source dogs?
SWIM's recommendation for anyone wanting to learn is to sign up for Breachforum and read up on all of the contents in their OSINT subforum [1] where you can ask questions too. If you're willing to boogey on into the grey area, you can even download leaked datasets from BreachForum, Leakbase.io, etc. to make your job a lot easier if it involves identifying people online - for example a few databases like AT&T customer…
I never liked this term. Why is the term "Open Source" used to refer to publicly available information? Something like "PAT" would have been a better acronym: Public Available Information. Do we refer to street dogs as open source dogs?
The term invariably seems to apply to two phenomenons: 1. Stalkers stalking people 2. Actors spreading misinformation on X about wartime atrocities I can see why they want to brand their stuff “Open Source” which sounds like a good thing.
All OSINT guides include a surprising amount of paid tools. OSINT tools are dime a dozen, you have to know how to use them.
Finding tools is easy, there are endless collections of them:
- https://github.com/jivoi/awesome-osint
The hard part is deciding when, where, how, and with what information to use them.
I am surprised how little information about OSINT is on hackernews (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=OSINT barely has results)
If you are not some journalist, you won't need serious OSINT. (Investigating someone for fun?)
You can play geoguesser for fun. That's "technically" OSINT and you will know geography. Here is a Geoguesser (Rainbolt) player finding places from images: https://www.youtube.com/@georainbolt/videos
Here are some OSINT challenges if you want: https://gralhix.com/list-of-osint-exercises/
A skill I recommend much more than OSINT is being good at normal searching and collecting some basic metadata, and getting the gist of new topics quickly.
- You want to buy something, how do you figure out the price, quality, and whether it is a good deal. How to quickly figure out what matters and what doesn't? Which features are common, which false advertised, which are aesthetic bloat.
- You are traveling or moving to a new city, how do you quickly figure out all the tricks locals know and not fall for tourist cash grabs.
- You find a shady website, app, or chrome extension. Pocke around with the source code and domain names to round up the entire operation and report it.
- Some new person you got to know works/likes something you know little about. How do you quickly figure out some deeper questions to ask.
- Find what an error in your computer.
It boils down to knowing the underlying structure of whatever you are digging. Insiders tend to know ecosystem so well it seems obvious, despite it being hard to integrate into for an outsider.
I never liked this term. Why is the term "Open Source" used to refer to publicly available information? Something like "PAT" would have been a better acronym: Public Available Information. Do we refer to street dogs as open source dogs?
I assume your line of thinking is that you associate "Open Source" with software freedom (warm fuzzy feelings) & dislike that being tainted by stalkers & military espionage. Leaving aside that OSINT pre-dates the software term, I think it's quite fitting given the context of the very capitalist-/corporate-friendly "Open Source" licensing trend subsuming the original corporate-unfriendly/copyleft "Free Software" movement. The former enables the military-industrial complex by taking advantage of publicly available data, the latter enables the corporate world by taking advantage of publicly available code.
It’s shockingly easy to find information about almost anyone within the first couple pages of google
"By following a structured approach and leveraging specialized tools, you can effectively gather, analyze, and verify information from publicly available sources."
Am I paranoid or was this partly written by an LLM? Or is it just naturally so vague and generic. I mean most of the tips are kinda legit, but after the title I expected a little more than this.
"Gather the Data: Use various tools and methods to collect information." "By following a structured approach and leveraging specialized tools, you can effectively gather, analyze, and verify information from publicly available sources." Am I paranoid or was this partly written by an LLM? Or is it just naturally so vague and generic. I mean most of the tips are kinda legit, but after the title I expected a little more…