Tools and Tips round up: SANS OSINT Summit, OSINT Live, Start.me pages and more
Plus guides to searching Instagram, using Discord bots for investigations, and Bluesky for journalists.
Two recent online events offered a ton of tips and resources for open source investigations.
On Sept. 22, SANS hosted an OSINT Summit. You can view the presentation titles and download the slides here. Presentations included:
@ranlocar also collected a list of the tools, books, webinars and other resources covered during the presentations.
On Oct. 5, SkopeNow hosted the latest edition of OSINT Live. Presenters included Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat, Ritu Gill of OSINT Techniques, and Cynthia Hetherington of the OSMOSIS Institute. Here’s a summary of key takeaways from the talks, and you can sign in here to watch the videos on demand.
Tools
📍 Google continued the evolution of its image search products by rolling out About this Image. Read about it in Wired.
📍 Khoji is a Python script that “looks at a Snapchat profile and is able to get all historic Bitmojis used on that account. There’s also a web version. (Via
)📍 This is a Python tool “that helps you determine when (approximately) some content was published. It finds the Last-Modified header of linked images on a particular web page.” (Via
)📍 I’ve also used Carbon Dating The Web to get an estimate of when a website went online. On a related note, @nixintel wrote a guide to finding post timestamps on different social networks.
📍 Here’s a tool to get a 3D map view of a location. As @dutch_osintguy said, “Sometimes during OSINT geolocating tasks having a 3d view of buildings or structures helps a lot.”
📍 A start.me page with OSINT resources for Canada.
📍 And here’s a start.me page with photo investigations tools. (via
)📍 This tutorial from @hatless1der explains how to use Google cached pages to view tweets. (via the Week in OSINT)
📍 Nitter.net lets you view tweets without ads and other distractions. Read more here.
📍 Enter search terms into this Japanese tool (use auto-translate in Chrome) to get YouTube results that list the video title, channel name, number of views, number of comments and number of likes. It’s an easy way to scan search results by engagement.(Via
)📍 X-ray.contact is a paid tool to run identity searches based on emails, phone numbers and other elements. (via
)Worth reading
📚 Henk Van Ess published “Tips for better research with Instagram.”
📚 Bluesky, a Twitter alternative, published a Bluesky for Journalists guide.
📚 Alisa Gbiorczyk wrote a guide to investigating international phone numbers.
📚 A free edition of the OSINT Newsletter showed how to use Discord bots for OSINT investigations.
📚 Sofia Santos has a great selection of OSINT exercises to test your skills.
📚 Here’s an article form Golden Owl about “OSINT Techniques for Identifying and Exposing Online Anonymity.”
📚 And Aida Kokanovic wrote the first part of a series about “Utilizing ChatGPT for OSINT Investigations.”
That’s it for this edition of Digital Investigations! Thanks for reading. Please follow me on Threads and Bluesky.
Thanks for the mention, Craig!
I don't have a relationship with Google. I've been boycotting it forever. How do I find the site's host?