The OSINT Curious Project

All good things come to an end, and OSINT Curious is no exception. In our final live stream, we are coming together to discuss why the project is finalized, and what is going to happen to the blog posts, videos, our discord channel, and all other material that we published along the years.  

We also give a big, heartfelt THANK YOU to all of our sponsors and patreons for supporting us in running this project, but also our listeners/viewers and everyone else that has been following us on this journey, developed their OSINT skills with us, and shared comments, questions and resources.   

Last, we share some of our favorite moments within OSINT Curious and discuss what's next for each of us.  Thank you all for being here. Don't forget to...STAY OSINT CURIOUS!!!

Join The OSINT Curious Project team as we talk about some news and tools in #OSINT. 

This week, Micah (@WebBreacher) and Christina (@ChristinaLekati) put some extra emphasis on demonstrating new tools and search techniques. They started by discussing SMART (Start Me Aggregated Resource Tool), an OSINT Start.me page parser and aggregator. Bash scripting came into the conversation shortly after and along with it, Sinwindie's (@OSINTDojo) video tutorial.  

OSINT on Mastodon had it's special place on this episode, as it is a social media platform that has been growing exponentially the past few weeks. We discussed what is different from other social media platforms and shared an introductory guide on how to conduct OSINT investigations on it. We also demonstrated 3 different ways & tools one can use to find usernames and accounts on Mastodon. 

Micah and Christina moved on to discuss the role cryptography can play in certain investigations and shared a blog post that acts as a useful introduction into this intersection of disciplines. 

Micah demonstrated the project "Backmoji", a resource that keeps historical data on the bitmoji's someone has historically used, based on their user ID. This database can reflect changes people have made in their appearance over time. 

Speaking of appearances and images, we also shared a twitter thread that lists a number of resources that help conduct and improve reverse image searches. The list does not only contain tools that conduct RIS, but also editing tools that help this process.  

Thank you for joining us for another episode, we wish everyone a happy holiday season and a happy new year! See you next time! 

📚 LINKS AND RESOURCES mentioned in this stream: 

SMART (Start Me Aggregated Resource Tool): https://webbreacher.com/2022/11/14/get-smart-about-osint/

Sinwindie's (@Sinwindie / @OSINTDojo) Bash Scripting Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrXZv0hST0M

Blog “Mastodon OSINT: A Comprehensive introduction” https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-osint-a-comprehensive-introduction/

WhatsMyName Username Checking Tool: https://whatsmyname.app/

Imagstodon Tool: https://seintpl.github.io/imagstodon/

Masto Tool: https://github.com/C3n7ral051nt4g3ncy/Masto

Blog: "Cryptography & OSINT - The fundamentals": https://www.dutchosintguy.com/post/cryptography-osint-the-fundamentals

Backmoji Tool: https://backmoji.osint.ninja

Twitter thread by “OSINT for All”: “Ultimate list of resources for reverse image search”: https://twitter.com/AllForOsint/status/1588348612802932736 

👁‍🗨 OSINT Curious:  

🌍WEBSITE: All of our resources, blog posts, 10 minute tips, videos and podcasts in one place. You also find ways to participate and support our project. https://osintcurio.us/ 

🦉TWITTER:  Connect with us! We post OSINT updates, news, tips and tools, and interact with the Twitter community. https://twitter.com/osintcurious 

👩‍💻 DISCORD:  Chat with us on The OSINT Curious Discord server! This is a place to share your own resources, ask questions, give and receive help in solving OSINT challenges, and interact with a very enthusiastic OSINT community. https://iam.osintcurio.us/discord

This week, Micah (@WebBreacher), and Christina (@ChristinaLekati) are joined by Chris Kirsch (chris_kirsch) for an interview! Chris is the CEO of runZero, a cyber asset management company he co-founded with Metasploit creator HD Moore. In 2017, he earned the Black Badge for winning the Social Engineering Capture the Flag competition at DEF CON, while last year, he participated as a judge for the vishing competition at the Social Engineering Community.

In this interview, we discuss the intersection between OSINT and social engineering. Chris shares with us stories from the application of OSINT in social engineering operations, and describes some of the top OSINT techniques and resources that he observed at the Social Engineering vishing competition. 

You can follow Chris on: 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/chris_kirsch

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ckirsch/

Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@chris_kirsch 

📚 LINKS AND RESOURCES mentioned in this stream: 

Layer8 Presentation "Using OSINT For Competitive Intelligence": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB-wLadJ3hk

Blog "Top OSINT sources and vishing pretexts from DEF CON’s social engineering competition": https://medium.com/@chris.kirsch/top-osint-sources-and-vishing-pretexts-from-def-cons-social-engineering-competition-8e08de4c8ea8

Blog "Corporate OSINT for Social Engineering": https://osintcurio.us/2022/05/17/corporate-osint-for-social-engineering/

Winning call from DEF CON SECTF 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhE372sqURU  

Pickpocketing talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvET4r4uARQ

Social engineering resources: https://medium.com/@chris.kirsch/social-engineering-recommended-resources-10243113b80b  

Chris' company: https://www.runzero.com/

External scanning using runZero: https://www.runzero.com/blog/external-scanning/   

👁‍🗨 OSINT Curious:  

🌍WEBSITE: All of our resources, blog posts, 10 minute tips, videos and podcasts in one place. You also find ways to participate and support our project. https://osintcurio.us/  

🦉TWITTER:  Connect with us! We post OSINT updates, news, tips and tools, and interact with the Twitter community. https://twitter.com/osintcurious  

🤝 PATREON SPONSORSHIP:  As our project continues to grow, we are increasingly thankful for those people, companies, and organizations that choose to support us financially. https://www.patreon.com/osintcurious  

👩‍💻 DISCORD:  Chat with us on The OSINT Curious Discord server! This is a place to share your own resources, ask questions, give and receive help in solving OSINT challenges, and interact with a very enthusiastic OSINT community. https://iam.osintcurio.us/discord

This week, Micah (@WebBreacher) and Christina (@ChristinaLekati), are joined by Robin (@NothicEye) to talk about this month's #OSINT News & Tools.   

Our conversation started by focusing on the individuals that are wishing to enter the world of open-source intelligence not only as hobbyists but also, perhaps, as professionals. We talked about our latest blog post “Five tips to get you started in OSINT” in which 5 of our OSINT Curious members are sharing one quick tip each on getting started in this space.   

Thinking of the ones who would like to start a career in OSINT or look for different opportunities, we moved on to discuss a series of new interviews that were posted last month in the OSINT Jobs website. The blog/interview series is called “What hiring managers are looking for” and draws from the perspectives of 6 different hiring managers in the OSINT industry. The questions in these interviews include "how can candidates stand out right away?" and "What does the recruitment process look like in your organization?" among other, many interesting questions.   

Few things can help an OSINT practitioner develop their skills and broaden their perspective more than belonging to a small or large group or community. Robin (@NothicEye) who is also one of the moderators of the OSINT Curious Discord group, was able to share with us her observations from participating in OSINT-focused groups. She points out that smaller groups of practitioners can have a wide range of benefits.  

Our team then moved on to discussing Nico Deken's (@dutch_osintguy) updates on his programmable search engine for people's digital business cards and social media details.  

For the Geolocation fans we shared and discussed two resources:  

1. Benjamin Strick's (@BenDoBrown) YouTube videos in which he goes through different tips, techniques and tools in geolocating visual elements. Last week, Benjamin started a new video series called "Let's Geolocate" 

2. A Geolocation Cheat Sheet from @TheSEINT - a pretty detailed mind map with different elements that you can investigate when you analyze an image and try to geolocate it.  

All the relevant links can be found below!  

📚 LINKS AND RESOURCES mentioned in this stream:  

OSINT Curious Blog: “Five tips to get you started in OSINT” : https://osintcurio.us/2022/10/13/five-tips-to-get-you-started-in-osint/  

OSINT Jobs Blog Post Series: “What hiring managers are looking for” : https://www.osint-jobs.com/blog/career-osint-jobs  

Nico Deken’s Custom Digital Business Card Search Engine: https://github.com/Dutchosintguy/digital-business-cards-pse/  

Benjamin Strick’s new YouTube series “Let’s Geolocate” (& other videos): https://www.youtube.com/c/Bendobrown   

Geolocation Cheat Sheet from @TheSEINT https://github.com/seintpl/osint/blob/main/Geolocation%20Analysis%20Diagram%20Outside%20clues.pdf   

👁‍🗨 OSINT Curious:  

🌍WEBSITE: All of our resources, blog posts, 10 minute tips, videos and podcasts in one place. You also find ways to participate and support our project. https://osintcurio.us/   

🦉TWITTER:  Connect with us! We post OSINT updates, news, tips and tools, and interact with the Twitter community. https://twitter.com/osintcurious   

🤝 PATREON SPONSORSHIP:  As our project continues to grow, we are increasingly thankful for those people, companies, and organizations that choose to support us financially. https://www.patreon.com/osintcurious   

👩‍💻 DISCORD:  Chat with us on The OSINT Curious Discord server! This is a place to share your own resources, ask questions, give and receive help in solving OSINT challenges, and interact with a very enthusiastic OSINT community. https://iam.osintcurio.us/discord

This week, Micah (@WebBreacher), Christina (@ChristinaLekati), and Nico (@dutch_osintguy) talked about this month's #OSINT News, Tools and Blogs.  

They started by discussing a new blog post by Theo Baxter (@T-Baxter90) on investigating violent and distressing content through an OSINT investigation. Two additional resources were recommended by our team, as complementary reading/viewing material to this very important topic. They also discussed their new OSINT Curious blog post “Find Company Data With A Programmable Search Engine”, written by @nixintel.  

Micah, Christina, and Nico went on showcasing and discussing some new interesting tools, including a tool that conducts url scans, a database of landmarks, and Instagram's new map feature that allows you to view the public stories from specific locations. They also showcased how to change user agent in Chrome, using built-in features.  

Last, this week's OSINT Curious team discussed some recent community projects and contributions that our listeners and viewers could find both useful and entertaining. If you did not have enough of OSINT goodness this week, head out to the videos that our team produced, in collaboration with David Bombal (details in the links below).  

📚 LINKS AND RESOURCES mentioned in this stream: 

Blog "Investigating violent & distressing content as part of OSINT investigations" : https://medium.com/@T_Baxter90/investigating-violent-distressing-content-as-part-of-osint-investigations-6fa141fa7f2d

Blog "Vicarious trauma and OSINT – a practical guide" : https://osintcurio.us/2020/06/08/vicarious-trauma-and-osint-a-practical-guide/

OSINT Curious Live Stream with Nicole Beckwith on mental health during OSINT investigations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03t7ctuVMnk

Blog "Find Company Data With a Programmable Search Engine": https://osintcurio.us/2022/09/12/find-company-data-with-a-programmable-search-engine/

UrlScan: https://urlscan.io

GeoHints: https://geohints.com/

Instagram's map feature: https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/instagram-map

UserAgent Switcher: https://twitter.com/WebBreacher/status/1572595024046465024  

WhatsMyName: https://whatsmyname.app

David Bombal's Videos With: 

Lisette, Steven, and Micah - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImWJgDQ-_ek 

Lisette and Steven - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsY32K1s51Y    

Micah - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6l2Bmh7Dq4  

NotMyPlate - Car Tracking: https://twitter.com/intidc/status/1574263808607997953 

👁‍🗨 OSINT Curious:  

🌍WEBSITE: All of our resources, blog posts, 10 minute tips, videos and podcasts in one place. You also find ways to participate and support our project. https://osintcurio.us/  

🦉TWITTER:  Connect with us! We post OSINT updates, news, tips and tools, and interact with the Twitter community. https://twitter.com/osintcurious  

🤝 PATREON SPONSORSHIP:  As our project continues to grow, we are increasingly thankful for those people, companies, and organizations that choose to support us financially. https://www.patreon.com/osintcurious  

👩‍💻 DISCORD:  Chat with us on The OSINT Curious Discord server! This is a place to share your own resources, ask questions, give and receive help in solving OSINT challenges, and interact with a very enthusiastic OSINT community. https://iam.osintcurio.us/discord

This week, Micah (@WebBreacher), Christina (@ChristinaLekati), and Michael James (@Ginsberg51050) talk with  Alex Slotnick (@BOsintBlanc), a threat intelligence analyst and the case tracking & statistics lead for the National Child Protection Task Force. 

Alex talked to us about his journey from Desktop Support to becoming an OSINT analyst, teaching himself the necessary skills to get started, and volunteering within a non-profit, which enabled him to offer the skills he had while also acquiring new ones through practical work and networking. As it turns out, getting this practical experience helped him to eventually get a corporate OSINT job too. 

He also talked to us about how he handles his confidence levels when working with incomplete data, and offered practical advice on acquiring several points of verification. As a natural follow-up to this conversation was some advice on handling data that contradict a finding or an investigative conclusion. 

Alex talked to us about his work at the National Child Protection Task Force, and answered multiple questions from the audience. He offered recommendations on books, tools, and offered advice on getting into OSINT. 

You can follow Alex on: 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BOsintBlanc

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bosintblanc/ 

📚 LINKS AND RESOURCES mentioned in this stream: 

The National Child Protection Task Force (NCPTF): https://www.ncptf.org/

Book: Structured Analytic Techniques by R. H. Pherson & R. J. Heuer  

Book: Open Source Intelligence Techniques by M. Bazzell

Book: The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by R. J. Heuer  

OSINT Dojo: https://www.osintdojo.com/

Epieos: https://epieos.com/

Dehashed: https://www.dehashed.com/ 

👁‍🗨 OSINT Curious:  

🌍WEBSITE: All of our resources, blog posts, 10 minute tips, videos and podcasts in one place. You also find ways to participate and support our project. https://osintcurio.us/ 

🦉TWITTER:  

Connect with us! We post OSINT updates, news, tips and tools, and interact with the Twitter community. https://twitter.com/osintcurious 

🤝 PATREON SPONSORSHIP:  

As our project continues to grow, we are increasingly thankful for those people, companies, and organizations that choose to support us financially. https://www.patreon.com/osintcurious

👩‍💻 DISCORD:  

Chat with us on The OSINT Curious Discord server! This is a place to share your own resources, ask questions, give and receive help in solving OSINT challenges, and interact with a very enthusiastic OSINT community. https://iam.osintcurio.us/discord 

Join The OSINT Curious Project team as we talk about some news and tools in #OSINT. 

This week, Micah (@WebBreacher) and Christina (@ChristinaLekati) talked about the OSINT Conferences that will be happening within the coming months, most of which are free to attend and packed with interesting talks. 

They moved on discussing & showcasing some tools starting with CCTV Mass Pirates, a map that shows the locations and certain specifications of over 160.000 cameras around the world. Some of the cameras on the map have open feeds, while another data point you may find are Mapillary keys. Mapillary is a service that is crowdsourcing geotagged photos & videos. Combined with the CCTV Mass Pirates map, these tools may prove very useful for investigations where Google StreetView is blocked or non-existent. After that, they talked about Travel Time Map, a tool that draws a travel time area on a map while giving you plenty of options to narrow down your research: travel means (bike, transportation, car, foot), date, time span, and more. These tools can be used on their own, or in combination. For that reason, we also discussed use cases.

Micah and Christina then talked about Image Extractor, a tool that allows users to download/extract all available images from a webpage. They went on highlighting OSINT Dojo as one of the useful resources in our community to practice and learn OSINT skills, but also talked about the Attack Surface Diagrams that are provided in the resources of OSINT Dojo's webpage (view links below). 

Later, they discussed the new OSINT Dark Web bookmarks provided by OSINT Combined, a curated list of bookmarks including search engines, services lists, leak sites and other resources that help OSINT investigators conduct research in the dark web. 

Last, they briefly discussed the two latest blog posts that were published through OSINT Curious, the team's upcoming streams and some news and activities that our OSINT Curious members have been involved in (including Rae Baker's upcoming OSINT book)!  

📚 LINKS AND RESOURCES mentioned in this stream: 

Recon Village: https://reconvillage.org/ 

GOSINTCon (German speaking OSINT conference): https://gosintcon.de/ 

Australian OSINT Symposium: https://www.osintsymposium.com/ 

Layer8 Conference: https://layer8conference.com/2022-back-in-person/ 

CCTV Mass Pirates: https://cctv.masspirates.org/ 

Mapillary: https://www.mapillary.com/ 

Travel Time Map : https://app.traveltime.com/ 

Image Extractor: https://extract.pics/ 

OSINT Dojo Diagrams: https://www.osintdojo.com/diagrams/main 

OSINT Combined Dark Web Bookmarks: https://www.osintcombine.com/dw-osint-bookmarks 

Old Skool OSINT Blog: https://osintcurio.us/2022/08/04/old-skool-osint/ 

Saving Facebook Blog: https://osintcurio.us/2022/06/14/saving-facebook/  

👁‍🗨 OSINT Curious:  

🌍WEBSITE: 

All of our resources, blog posts, 10 minute tips, videos and podcasts in one place. You also find ways to participate and support our project. https://osintcurio.us/  

🦉TWITTER:  

Connect with us! We post OSINT updates, news, tips and tools, and interact with the Twitter community. https://twitter.com/osintcurious  

🤝 PATREON SPONSORSHIP:  

As our project continues to grow, we are increasingly thankful for those people, companies, and organizations that choose to support us financially. https://www.patreon.com/osintcurious  

👩‍💻 DISCORD:  

Chat with us on The OSINT Curious Discord server! This is a place to share your own resources, ask questions, give and receive help in solving OSINT challenges, and interact with a very enthusiastic OSINT community. https://iam.osintcurio.us/discord

This week, Micah (@WebBreacher) and Christina (@ChristinaLekati) talk with us Jessica Smith (@scarlettsleuth), founder of ClickSafe Intelligence and a volunteer at the National Child Protection Task Force. 

We discuss Jessica's work in OSINT and her contributions at the National Child Protection Task Force. Jessica offers her perspective and tips in working against online child exploitation and together with parents to protect children from predators. She also talks to us about her latest venture, ClickSafe Intelligence, which aims to create and deliver relevant, illustrative, and evidence-driven child exploitation prevention and response education to parents, kids and child-safety professionals. 

If you are a parent or simply a concerned individual that cares about online safety, this is a great interview to listen to.

Links & Resources mentioned in this stream: Jessica's Twitter Profile: https://twitter.com/scarlettsleuth

National Child Protection Task Force: https://www.ncptf.org/

National Child Protection Task Force Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/NCPTF8

(@ncptf8) ClickSafe Intelligence: https://clicksafeintelligence.com/

ClickSafe Intelligence Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/clicksafeintel

(@clicksafeintel)

#osint #osintcurious #opensourceintelligence #onlinesafety

This week, Micah (@WebBreacher), Michael James (@Ginsberg5150) and Christina (@ChristinaLekati) talk with Loránd Bodó (@LorandBodo) about his new project OSINT Jobs (https://www.osint-jobs.com), a platform that shares hand-picked, OSINT-related job openings and helps the OSINT community grow their skills and advance their careers. 

They discuss about the diversity of OSINT-related jobs in different industries, and about how Loránd is curating the job opportunities he publishes on the website. 

They also talk about utilizing the content that is published within www.osint-jobs.com which includes interviews, blog posts and a podcast. Those resources help individuals to better understand what career path to follow within the realm of OSINT, how to develop the skills necessary for their dream job, and how to get connected and apply for jobs.  

Last, they talked about doing freelance work and getting a fair pay for OSINT services, along with answering viewer questions.

Join The OSINT Curious Project team as we talk about some news and tools in #OSINT. This week, Micah (@WebBreacher) and Christina (@ChristinaLekati) briefly talk about the new OSINT Curious blog : "Location of an IP Address" and the dangers of relying too heavily on the geolocations that become available through IP addresses. Sector035 (@Sector035), who authored the blog, will cover this topic in more detail next week. They also talked about the Geowifi, a tool that aggregates wifi data from multiple sources, and discussed #OSINT use cases with the tool Cleanup.Pictures, a tool that is used to retouch images by removing objects, people, texts and other disturbances. Micah and Christina also talked about the role of gut feelings and hunches in OSINT as well as how they can support or hinder the intelligence analysis process. Listening to our gut feeling is important, but in intelligence analysis one needs to also be aware of their biases, and of how their past experiences might affect their gut feeling and their judgement. Last, they talked about Obsidian, a note-taking and knowledge management tool that provides many possibilities when it comes to documenting, organizing, and creating connections between data - or even their thoughts.