Indicator Guides

No code, no budget: 7 web scrapers put to the test

Scraping no longer demands coding skills or a big budget. Here's how seven options held up across three real-world tests.

Workshop video: Using AI to investigate a North Korean hiring scam

Plus: how to connect an LLM to Obsidian for investigative work

Get your machine set up for OSINT

The free apps, browser extensions, and OPSEC tools investigators install first.

Workshop video: AI skills for investigators

The Indicator Guide to Using Skills in Chrome for OSINT

Three ready-to-install browser prompts for analyzing social media profiles, extracting entities from webpages, and assessing images — plus how to build your own.

Earth Index: A step-by-step guide to searching satellite imagery with AI

How to set up a project, label samples, and search for matching structures and landscape features across the planet.

19 free tools you can use to investigate a URL

Tools and techniques for digging into links, redirects, parameters, and more.

Finding the real owner of a company: a guide to beneficial ownership in the EU, UK, and beyond

2026 could be a turning point for universal beneficial ownership data. Here's what investigators need to know.

The Indicator Guide to building your own reverse image search engine

Step-by-step instructions for how to index a private dataset of images (or videos) and run reverse image search queries against it.

The Indicator guide to investigating ecommerce sites

A practical walkthrough of the tools, techniques, and indicators used to analyze online stores and identify ecommerce fraud operations.

The Indicator Guide to using Telegram in digital investigations

Telegram has become a top source for documenting global conflicts — and so much more. Here's how to use it for investigations.

The Indicator Guide to hunting for documents and files in open buckets, servers, and directories

How to find interesting and potentially confidential documents sitting on a publicly-accessible server or website

The Indicator Guide to investigating digital ad libraries

Ad repositories can help with backgrounding people and companies, and with investigating influence and disinformation campaigns

The Indicator Guide to AI labels

We’ve collected in one place how and when major platforms label AI content

The Indicator Guide to tools for capturing webpages and social media content

We tested 12 tools ranging from full-featured continuous capture apps to one-off screenshot extensions for grabbing long webpages

The Indicator Guide to connecting websites together using OSINT tools and methods

A deep dive into new and established ways to fingerprint site content and infrastructure, link sites via ad and analytics IDs/tags, favicons, and more

The Indicator Guide to investigating online reviews

How to analyze online reviews and spot suspicious accounts

Key tools and approaches for using AI in OSINT and investigations

AI and LLMs pose significant risk to information integrity. But they also offer a lot of promise for OSINT and investigations. Here's a look at some encouraging areas.