Week in OSINT #2024-06

Another Monday, another small recap from the world of OSINT! This week I have some tools, tricks, tips and other topics!

Another busy week, with a lot of things happening in the world of OSINT. Due to my busy schedule, I am unable to mention everything, but I did spot some interesting things over on social media that I wanted to share:

• Top OSINT Tools
• Grep for OSINT
• NeedleStack Podcast
• UNREDACTED Magazine
• Google Cache
• Europol Hackathon

Tip: Top OSINT Tools

Ritu Gill [ ] has collected a bunch of OSINT tools that can help you with your investigations. With each tool she explains why she likes the tool, and what you can do with it. It features sites that are well known in the community, like Epieos, the Internet Archive and Whatsmyname. But these lists are always great to share for people that are new to the scene. Of course, at number 1, is her own 'Forensic OSINT' tool, that helps you capture evidence from within your browser.

Blog: https://www.forensicosint.com/top-osint-tools

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_MvkgEv0sA

Tutorial: Grep for OSINT

Bashinho [ ] solved a tricky question by Tilman Wagner [ ] the other day, by using so called 'Regular Expressions' (check out the last item here). By using this query language, he was able to narrow down the amount of ships he needed to check, to only 2!

Right after this, he wrote a blog post about regular expressions, where he explains some basic expressions that can be used to search within data. All his blogs are in German, but they do contain a wealth of information. So use your favourite translation tool, and take time reading up on this useful query language!

Link: https://bashinho.de/2024/02/08/...

Media: NeedleStack Podcast

Last week NeedleStack [ ] published a new, short, episode of their podcast. In it they talk about different free, and some very affordable trainings. Many well-known names and platforms are dropped, but in case you are new to the scene and are looking for ways to enhance your knowledge, or train your skills, then I do recommend you listen to this episode.

Link: https://pod.link/1600516532/episode/...

Tip: UNREDACTED Magazine

After a hiatus of about a year, issue number 6 of the 'Unredacted' magazine from Michael Bazzell [ ] has been published! It contains a lot of high-quality articles on privacy and OSINT, but Michael Bazzell does need your help!

Direct link to PDF: https://inteltechniques.com/issues/006.pdf

Tip: Google Cache

Micah Hoffman [ ] shared some solid tips over on X about other places where caches websites can be found, like Bing, Yandex and even the good old Yahoo! So there are enough options left, and to make things easier, there are also handy extensions to help you find archived or cached pages. Do read up on each of those websites, to make sure you understand what each platform offers.

Link: Chrome extension

Link: Firefox add-on

News: Europol Hackathon

I try to keep these episodes about tips, techniques or tools, and usually stay away from worldly affairs. But once in a while you read an article that just needs to be shared here. Like this initiative, where law enforcement and experts from 23 countries came together in The Hague, to search for Ukrainian children by using open source information. These type of hackathons are extremely difficult, looking at the circumstances involved, so respect for everyone who was involved in this! I already heard about this from several colleagues, but of course Christiaan Triebert [ ] was also quick in sharing the news!

Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68249102

FUNINT: This Week's Meme

There are some rather affordable courses out there, like Aware Online and My OSINT Training, just to name two, and they actually give you a lot of bang for your buck! But a lot of you probably have seen those $50 courses, with 100 hours of material, on some shady website... Well, this meme is about THOSE courses!

Have a good week and have a good search!