Tools and tips round up: ChatGPT for OSINT, tools for email investigations, and more
Tools and tips round up: ChatGPT for OSINT, tools for email investigations, and more
The first of a regular round up of tools and techniques
I’m an obsessive collector of digital tools and techniques to help with investigations. I use Twitter lists, email newsletters and Google Alerts to keep a steady stream of new and interesting links and ideas coming at me. Every once in a while I’ll pull together a collection of interesting/useful things I’ve come across thanks to wonderful folks in the journalism, OSINT and infosec communities.
The first edition is below. As you might expect, there’s a few items related to AI. Enjoy, and be sure to follow/subscribe to the people behind this stuff.
One last thing: I’m helping teach an online course that starts June 12: Advanced digital investigations: How reporters can dig into online information and sources. It’s a five-week course with video lectures, readings, online discussions, and guest speakers. We’ll cover topics such as digital workflow, investigating online sources, websites, and digital ads. The course is asynchronous, meaning you can complete it on your own time. It costs US $95. The course info and signup just went live so please take a look!
📍 cqcore, aka Ginger T on Twitter, has a GitHub with a fantastic collection of tools for investigating websites, Telegram, email addresses, phones, companies etc. Really comprehensive lists of browser extensions, tools, and other resources.
📍 DorkGPT uses AI to generate Google dorks based on you telling it what you’re hoping to find. It’s a bit hit and miss, but can be useful in trying to coming up with boolean queries.
📍 Similarly, DorkGenius can take a plain text entry and generate dorks for Google, DuckDuckgo, and Bing.
📍 Online searching wizard Henk Van Ess launched Google Word Sniper. It uses ChatGPT to help you “search for the exact words you need on Google, in the same headline, sentence, or paragraph!”
📍 Henk also wrote an interesting newsletter about using ChatGPT to help with geolocation, and a newsletter about using ChatGPT to come up with Google search formulas.
📍 ChatPDF lets you upload a PDF and use ChatGPT to summarize, analyze, or extract data from it.
📍 Gaisma is a tool to help you determine “sunrise, sunset, dawn and dusk times around the World.”
📍 Bellingcat launched an OpenStreetMap Search Tool.
📍 The fabulous Epieos email search tool added the ability to search by phone number.
📍 OSINT Industries also has a great email tool that tells you if an address has been used to register accounts at a wide range of sites/services.
📍 Jake Creps of the excellent OSINT Newsletter launched Poastal, a similar email OSINT tool you can run on your desktop.
📍 Cyb_detective, who also has a must read newsletter, launched a free online course to teach beginners Python for OSINT in 21 days.
📍 They also have an insane map of OSINT tools to help you find people and info around the world.
📍 FaceCheck is a tool to help you find people online by their face/photo.
📍 The folks behind Gephi, one of the most popular network visualization tools, launched a lighter web-based version, Gephi Lite.
📍 The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project published a guide to searching for people across borders.
📍 The Global Investigative Journalism Network published three guides as part of its new cyber investigations program. The guides focus on investigating disinformation and digital infrastructure, and on understanding the digital threat landscape. I’m lucky to be working as an instructor with the first cohort of GIJN fellows. GIJN will publish a couple more of these guides, so stay tuned!
📍 Nico Dekens, aka Dutch Osint Guy, published “A Practical Guide for OSINT Investigators to Combat Disinformation and Fake Reviews Driven by AI (ChatGPT).”
Finally, a big congrats to Sector305 on running the fantastic Week in OSINT for 5 years! It’s a must read.