Tools and tips round up: Finding deleted tweets and new tools from Bellingcat
Plus: upcoming free and paid workshops.
It’s been a few months since my last tools and tips round up, so here we go!
📍 Bellingcat created Search Grid Generator, which “helps you investigate an area of interest square by square. Put in coordinates and it will create a grid file for you that can be used in Google Earth.” Tomi McCluskey wrote a guide to using it.
📍 Bellingcat also launched a Shadow Finder Tool, which “helps you quickly narrow down where an image was taken, by reducing your search area from the entire globe to just a handful of countries and locations.” Read more here.
📍 And Bellingcat launched its comprehensive Online Investigations Toolkit. It’s a great list of OSINT tools and resources.
📍 Henk van Ess launched a new version of his tool to find deleted tweets. He also updated Search Whisperer. Details on that here.
📍 Lolarchiver launched a tool to retrieve the username and bio history of Twitter users that were active between 2011 and 2023.
📍 Techjournalisto shared a link to Rootabout.com, which you can use to run reverse image searches in the Internet Archive and Open Library. It’s made by the creator of FotoForensics.
📍 Ginger T created a nice search interface for his huge collection of OSINT resources, The OSINT Toolbox.
📍 Deen Freelon updated his Python package for TikTok. It lets you download videos from users and hashtag pages, and from the "You May Like" section of video pages.
📍 Watchframebyframe.com is a tool that lets you slow down and watch YouTube and Vimeo videos frame by frame. (via Mike Reilley)
📍 Toutatis is a Python tool that “allows you to extract information from instagrams accounts such as e-mails, phone numbers and more.” (via @0xtechrock)
📍 My OSINT Training created a bunch of handy bookmarklets that you can use for a range of OSINT tasks. Learn more about the bookmarklets in this video.
📍 Wayback Keyword Search is a Python tool that “downloads each page from the Wayback Machine for a specific domain and enables further keyword search on each saved page.” (Via
)📍 Lenso.ai is an AI-powered reverse image search tool. (via
)📍 Dork King is a helpful tool that lets you run a wide range of Google dorks on a target domain. It looks for open directories, log files, login pages, etc. (via
)📍 If you want to see if a phone number is connected to a WhatsApp account, try WhatsApp Mobile Checker. It will tell you if it’s active and will pull information such as a profile photo. (also via the great
)📍 Google launched a new feature that lets you access an archived version of a webpage from search results, via the Internet Archive. This replaces Google cache, which the company recently deactivated. (Though Dutch OSINT Guy outlined how you can sometimes still find cached pages.)
📍 GeoSpy built a geolocation game called Battle. You compete against its AI to guess the location of an image. (Go to the homepage and click on “Battle GeoSpy” in the upper right.)
A few resources related to the US election:
📍 The Rolli app launched a US Election Dashboard that displays visualizations of Twitter data and discussions related to the Democratic and Republican candidates for president and VP.
📍 Who Targets Me has a dashboard for election ad spending on Meta and Google. This is the page for the US data (and this one shows ad targeting data). Who Targets Me also has data for other countries. Want to learn more about digging into ad data? Read my previous post.
📍 The News Literacy Project has a dashboard that lists examples of U.S. election misinformation that’s been debunked by fact checkers. More info here.
Webinars (and events) worth attending
🖥️ SkopeNow is holding its free annual OSINT Live 2024 virtual event on Oct. 10 at 10 am ET. View the agenda and sign up.
🖥️ The paid OSMOSIS OSINT conference is Oct. 20 to 22 in Las Vegas and online. I’m thrilled to be giving a workshop on digital ads. View the agenda and register. They offer free virtual registration for students, so reach out to the OSMOSIS association for info.
🖥️ The SANS OSINT Summit is Feb. 24 and 25. You can attend some of it for free online; the in-person event has a fee. View the agenda and register. SANS is also offering a related paid OSINT training workshop. Info at the same page.
Worth reading
📚 Petro Cherkasets wrote, “Complete domain name research framework. Thinking beyond OSINT tools”
📚 Nihad A. Hassan wrote the guide, “Using Reddit in OSINT”
📚 The Global Investigative Journalism Network wrote, “Smoke and Lies’: How Visual Forensics Disproved Official Accounts of a Deadly Migrant Center Fire”
📚 GIJN also wrote, “How BBC Open Source Journalists Investigate, Analyze, and Verify Information from Gaza”
📚 Rae Baker wrote, “The OSINT Exposure of Offshore Oil Platforms”
📚 Janus Rose wrote, “AI Tools Make It Easy to Clone Voices Without Consent”"
📚 MJ Banias wrote, “A Free OSINT Lesson: How Many Shell Companies Does This Guy Have?”
📚 Banias also wrote, “A Free OSINT Lesson: “Google Scholar,” the OSINTers Dream That No One Uses”
📚 Nina Maelainine wrote, “Step-by-Step OSINT Roadmap for Investigating Videos”
📚 The University of California Digital Investigations Network wrote, “The Use of Open Source Investigation Methods in Tracking Environmental Harms”
That’s it for this edition of Digital Investigations! Thanks for reading. You can find me on Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and LinkedIn. I’m not very active on Twitter these days.