Week in OSINT #2024-20

This week another small collection of news, articles and tips, curated by me, and shared for your Monday morning pleasure.

This week was a bit difficult to get the episode out, since I had a rather busy, and somewhat weird schedule last week. After working some odd shifts, and some extra hours, I had to take it a bit easy on the weekend and spent some time on myself. I will however always keep an eye out for interesting news or tips, so I decided to write my personal thoughts on those in this episode anyway, so you at least have a small insight in what I read last week. No big surprises here, since the content comes from some pretty well-known names out there, but it is nice to know I spared you the searching on this Monday, right?

• Street View
• Newsletters
• The Dark Web
• OSINT Mistakes
• OldTweetDeck

Tip: Street View

Last week Cyb_detective [ ] shared a tip about Bing 'Steetside'. A lot of people know Google Street View, Apple Look Around, or maybe even Kart View. But Microsoft also has a really good coverage with Streetside. It is not as up-to-date as Google, but it never hurt to try and find a different source, if Google can't help out.

And in case Bing doesn't have the answer, it might be good to know there are several other street view providers out there, depending on the country you are investigating, all mentioned on a Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_street_view_services

Links: Newsletters

Maciej Makowski [], better known under the handle 'osintme', has curated a list of OSINT newsletters. He isn't very active on social media any more, but do keep an eye out for his blog posts, like this one. It contains pretty much all news sources that collect and share news from the open source investigation and intelligence world, and I recommend going over all of them if you want to stay up-to-date.

Link: https://www.osintme.com/index.php/2024/05/17/...

Article: The Dark Web

Ritu Gill [ ] shared this older article the other week, that goes over some of the basics when it comes to browsing the dark web. It explains some important things, like the importance of staying safe, using VPN's or proxies to disconnect yourself from your corporate network, and other tips. It is mostly a commercial post for Silo for Research, which is a cloud based platform for researching, by Authentic8 [ ], but the tips within this article, are for everyone.

Within the article, there are several other links that lead to more blog posts by Authentic8. They feature articles about how to really blend in while researching, some more basic information on the several 'nets' out there, and more. So do click along, and read up about some basic tips and tricks to stay somewhat safe, on this darker side of the internet highway.

Link: https://www.authentic8.com/blog/...

Article: OSINT Mistakes

Sofia Santos [ ] wrote a blog post about mistakes that can be made during open source investigations. She writes about the importance of verification, and about not always finding answers we so desire. She has some really good advice in this small post, and I do recommend you to read it. I recognise what she is writing, and I can only add: As long as you stay curious, and have the drive to keep looking for facts, and facts alone, than you are doing your job right!

Link: https://gralhix.com/2024/05/18/...

Tool: OldTweetDeck

I have mentioned this extension for Chrome and Firefox before, and I still use it because it is so powerful. The old Tweetdeck, that is part of the paid subscription called "X Pro", can be recreated with a simple extension. It has all the old features, and it will save you paying several dollars a month for roughly the same experience. And since I've been using it extensively in the last few weeks, I thought it was worth another mention. They also updated the extension last week due to the fact that the 'twitter.com' domain is slowly being moved towards 'x.com'.

Link: https://github.com/dimdenGD/OldTweetDeck

FUNINT: This Week's Meme

Badum-tsss...

Have a good week and have a good search!