OSINT

The top 50+ most recommended OSINT tools

We analyzed +12,000 tools across 19 public OSINT toolkits. Here's what the community suggests most

I run a due diligence investigations firm and this is where AI is (and isn’t) useful

Five ways AI helps investigative research, what it gets wrong, and why it won't replace your judgment.

The Indicator Framework: How to tell what your digital evidence is actually worth

A repeatable method for weighing the indicators in an OSINT investigation and telling the genuine leads from the fakes, the dead ends, and the merely common.

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

32 OSINT tools and tips I discovered at the Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference

How to surface sealed court cases, trace crypto for free, unmask anonymous companies, and use a new tool to search documents in a powerful way.

Get your machine set up for OSINT

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

Workshop video: AI skills for investigators

Tips for images, geolocation, and visualization that I learned from 5 OSINT videos

A satellite imagery cheat sheet, enhancing images, and selecting the right visualization tools for analysis and reports.

Show & Tell: How Amnesty International collects evidence from war zones for visual investigations

We talked with Barbara Marcolini of Amnesty International about how she documented the Israeli military’s destruction of civilian infrastructure in southern Lebanon

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.

Workshop video: Finding the true owner of a company

We covered tips and tools for uncovering beneficial ownership

OSINT Navigator is now publicly available

Search 7,500+ OSINT tools to find the right one for your investigation.

Show & Tell: How Bellingcat's Kolina Koltai unmasked some of the worst people on the internet

We talked about her work exposing the networks behind non-consensual deepfake pornography

Announcing the beta of OSINT Navigator

Ask OSINT Navigator a question, and it will suggest tools that can assist with your investigation

OSINT tips for investigating WordPress sites

How to find author accounts and inspect images, files, and plugins

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

Why is GitHub restricting accounts that share OSINT and dark web resources?

At least half a dozen repos or entire accounts were recently banned or blocked from public access

3 free or affordable social media monitoring tools for your OSINT toolkit

These tools can help fill some of the void left by CrowdTangle (RIP)

How repurposed YouTube channels spread misinformation and undermine platform integrity — and how to identify them

A new study identified thousands of YouTube channels that changed their name, description and content focus, typically after being sold to a new owner.

5 new (to me) OSINT tools for researching YouTube, Meta ads, and more

How to find out if a YouTube video is monetized, analyze election and social issues ads in new ways, and refine your Google queries

Briefing: AI bots join Community Notes and Clothoff whistleblower speaks

Plus: Academics try fighting AI peer reviews with hidden prompts, SCOTUS refuses to review case against fact-checkers, and a tool that lets you search X without being logged in.

Workshop Video: Hunting fake online reviews and no-code scraping

Here's the video, notes, slides and transcript of our first workshop

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

Briefing: Elon Musk's rare Community Notes and AI slop everywhere

Your must reads and must tries on the digital deception beat this week