Mastering Osint: How to Find Information on Anyone

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 customers and the NationalPublicData database were leaked recently which is kind of like having a private LexisNexis Accurint at your fingertips.

[1] https://breachforums.st/Forum-OSINT

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?

Some funny anecdote, my fullname is relatively unique, two or three people have it AFAIK. On my upwork profile, they put the military veteran status because a completely unrelated military guy with the same name shows up in the google/linkedin search. I can't remove the status, I don't even look like the other guy.

I couldn't get those Google searches to find my resume. I wonder if I was doing something wrong...

When it’s impossible to prevent bad actors from gaining access to weapons, the best thing to do is to level the field by giving the same weapons to everyone.

It’s kind of mad.

From my impression, the way you get good at OSINT is knowing which types of information tend to be related, and where to go with what you have.

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://osintframework.com/

- https://github.com/jivoi/awesome-osint

- https://cylect.io/

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.

There was a command line tool available where you could enter a few attributes (such as a username) and the tool would plow through just about every online service to find and report data. Anyone remember what it was?

It’s shockingly easy to find information about almost anyone within the first couple pages of google

"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 than this.