Offensive OSINT Methodology

Workflow

1. Define target scope (domain, org, person, crypto address, or geo subject)
2. Select applicable categories below based on scope
3. Work top-down within each category; pivot on discovered artifacts
4. Archive every key artifact: URL + timestamp + screenshot (PNG) + hash (SHA-256)
5. Log findings in JSONL with a run_id and tool versions for reproducibility
6. Suggest next steps based on what each tool returns

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General OSINT

• Bookmarks — Comprehensive OSINT bookmarks
• OSINT Framework — Tool/resource directory
• IntelTechniques Tools — Suite of investigative tools
• Bellingcat Toolkit — Investigative journalism tools
• CyberSudo OSINT Toolkit — OSINT websites list
• Google Dorks — Efficient Google searching
• Distributed Denial of Secrets — Leaked data
• Country-Specific Resources — Country-targeted OSINT

Search Engines

Tool	Notes
Carrot2	Clusters results by topic
etools	Metasearch engine
Kagi	Privacy-first, non-personalized results
Brave Search	Independent index; Goggles for custom ranking
PDF Search	Search PDF files and view table of contents
Google Fact Check Explorer	Cross-site fact-check search

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Username & Email Investigation

Tool	Purpose
Sherlock	Username search across social networks
Maigret	Collect profiles by username from many sites
What's My Name	Username search across platforms
Holehe	Check if email is registered on platforms
Epieos	Email address pivots and metadata
OSINT Industries	Email/username/phone lookups
Hunter.io	Find email addresses for a domain
EmailRep	Email reputation and associated data
Emailable	Verify email existence
Mugetsu	X/Twitter username history
RocketReach / Apollo	Email enrichment and pattern guessing
PhoneInfoga	Phone number intelligence framework

Browser extensions: GetProspect, SignalHire

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People Search

• TruePeopleSearch — Free U.S. people search
• WhitePages — Contact information
• Spokeo — People search engine
• Webmii — People search
• Pipl — Deep web people search (paid)
• Clearbit — Company/individual data enrichment
• FaceCheck / FaceSeek — Reverse face search

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Phone Number OSINT

• TrueCaller — Caller ID and spam blocking
• ThatsThem — Reverse phone search
• Infobel — Phone search outside USA
• FreeCarrierLookup — Carrier/type lookup (US)
• NumlookupAPI [Freemium] — Programmatic carrier/line-type checks
• CallerIDTest — Phone search
• Advanced Background Checks — All people linked to a number

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Social Media

Platform	Tool
Instagram	Picuki — view profiles without account
X/Twitter	snscrape — preferred CLI scraper; use Twint only as fallback
Facebook	Graph Search, sowsearch.info, lookup-id.com, whopostedwhat.com
Facebook (research)	Meta Content Library — CrowdTangle successor (researcher-gated)
YouTube/Twitch	Social Blade — analytics
TikTok	Tokboard — trend and profile analytics
Reddit	Reveddit — removed content; RedTrack.social — user history
Bluesky	Firesky — real-time firehose; SkyView — follower graphs
Mastodon	FediSearch — cross-instance search; Fedifinder — find Twitter users on Mastodon
Faces	Search4Faces

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Public Records & Company Information

• OpenCorporates — World's largest open company database
• SEC EDGAR — U.S. company filings
• OpenOwnership Register — Beneficial ownership datasets
• MuckRock — FOIA repository and request tracking
• EU Tenders (TED) — EU procurement notices
• World Bank Projects — Project and procurement records

RU/CN Registries

Russia: Rusprofile, Kontur.Focus (freemium), zakupki.gov.ru (procurement), EGRUL/EGRIP (official, captcha-gated)

China: GSXT (National Enterprise Credit), Qichacha/Tianyancha (freemium), MIIT ICP/Beian (ICP filings)

Sanctions & Compliance

• OFAC SDN List
• EU Sanctions Map
• OpenSanctions — Aggregated persons/entities datasets
• OCCRP Aleph — Investigative documents, leaks, company records

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Breach & Leak Data

• Have I Been Pwned — Breach lookup; Pwned Passwords API (k-anonymity)
• Dehashed — Credential search
• IntelX — Data intelligence
• LeakCheck — Breach lookups
• Snusbase — Database breach lookups
• BreachDirectory — Recent breach credentials
• Scattered Secrets
• Cavalier (Hudson Rock) — Infostealer lookups
• Phonebook
• LeakPeek

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Infrastructure & Attack-Surface OSINT

• Shodan — Internet-connected device/service search
• Censys — Host and certificate enumeration
• GreyNoise — Distinguish background noise from targeted scans
• SecurityTrails — Passive DNS and asset discovery
• SpiderFoot — Automated recon and correlation
• theHarvester — Subdomain, email, metadata harvesting
• Recon-ng — Web recon framework
• Amass / Subfinder — Passive subdomain discovery
• BuiltWith — Tech stack enumeration
• Netlas — Large-scale HTTP/DNS/certificate pivots
• BinaryEdge / FOFA / ZoomEye — Infra pivots complementing Shodan/Censys
• RiskIQ PassiveTotal — Passive DNS/cert/host pivots
• Spur — IP lookups and tracking
• Robtex — Passive DNS and infrastructure pivots

ASN/BGP & Internet Measurement

• Hurricane Electric BGP Toolkit — ASN, prefix, peers, IRR data
• RIPEstat — IP/ASN history, routing, geolocation, abuse contacts
• BGPView — ASN and prefix explorer
• bgp.tools — Clean ASN/IX views, routing details
• PeeringDB — Facility and peering info

Certificates & CT Monitoring

• crt.sh — Search Certificate Transparency logs
• Censys Certificates — CT and x509 attribute pivots
• CertStream — Real-time CT feed via WebSocket
• Rapid7 Open Data — Sonar DNS/HTTP/SSL datasets
• Cert Spotter [Freemium] — CT monitoring and alerts
• Favicon hash (mmh3): cluster infrastructure; pair with Shodan/Censys favicon search

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Threat Intel & IOCs

• Vendor/CERT advisories: CISA/NSA/CSA joint advisories, CERT-EU, NCSC-UK, JPCERT/CC, CERT-UA
• MISP Project and public MISP feeds
• OpenCTI — CTI knowledge graph
• Malpedia — Malware families, YARA, references
• ThreatFox / URLHaus / SSLBL
• MalwareBazaar — Hash-based sample sharing
• PhishTank / OpenPhish

Malware Analysis & Sandboxes

• Static analysis: pefile, FLOSS, capa
• Similarity: SSDEEP, TLSH
• Sandboxes: ANY.RUN, Hybrid Analysis, CAPE, Tria.ge
• Intelligence: Intezer (code reuse), VirusTotal (caution: uploads become public)
• TLS fingerprints: JA3, JA4

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Cryptocurrency OSINT

Blockchain Explorers

Chain	Explorer
Bitcoin	Blockchain.com, Blockchair
Ethereum	Etherscan
BNB Chain	BSCScan
Polygon PoS	PolygonScan
Solana	Solscan
Multi-chain	OKLink [Freemium], Cielo

L2 Explorers: Arbiscan, Optimistic Etherscan, BaseScan, zkSync Era, L2Beat (risk/TVL comparison)

Transaction Tracking & Analytics

• Arkham — Multichain explorer, entity labels, graphs, alerts
• TRM — Address/transaction graphs
• MetaSleuth — Visual crypto flow analysis
• Breadcrumbs [Freemium] — Visual graphing and labeling
• Bubblemaps — Holder concentration visualization
• Whale Alert — Large transaction monitoring
• Chainalysis / Crystal Blockchain — Professional analytics
• GraphSense — Cryptocurrency analytics platform
• Nansen — Smart Money labels (paid)
• Dune — Custom blockchain data queries
• Token Sniffer — Honeypot and scam token detection

NFT & Exchange Intelligence

• OpenSea / NFTScan — NFT marketplace/explorer
• DappRadar — NFT sales and marketplace activity
• CoinGecko / CoinMarketCap — Market data
• Glassnode — On-chain market intelligence

Bridge Monitoring

• Socketscan — EVM bridge explorer
• L2Beat Bridges — Bridge risk analysis
• Pulsy — Bridge explorer aggregator

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Media Intelligence

Reverse Image & Facial Search

• Google Images — General reverse image search
• TinEye — Reverse image search
• Yandex Images — Effective for Russian/Eastern European content
• PimEyes — Face-based image search
• FaceCheck — Find people by photo

Image Forensics

• Forensically — Digital image forensics toolkit
• ExifTool — Read/write/edit metadata
• Jimpl — Online EXIF viewer
• Jeffrey's EXIF viewer — Online metadata viewer
• FOCA — Metadata in documents
• Metagoofil — Extract metadata from public documents
• C2PA Verify — Verify content credentials and AI provenance

Video Analysis

• YouTube Data Viewer — Extract YouTube metadata
• InVID & WeVerify — Video verification browser extension
• YouTube Geo Tag — Video geolocation via geo tags
• MediaInfo — Technical/tag info for video/audio
• Snap Map (public stories) — Area/event context

Browser Extensions for Media

• Fake News Debunker by InVID & WeVerify
• RevEye Reverse Image Search
• EXIF Viewer Pro
• Wayback Machine Extension
• Search by Image

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Geospatial Intelligence

Satellite Imagery & Mapping

• Google Maps / Bing Maps — General mapping
• Sentinel Hub EO Browser — Sentinel/Landsat satellite imagery
• NASA Worldview — NASA satellite imagery
• Zoom Earth — Live satellite images and weather
• Wayback Imagery — Historical satellite images
• NASA FIRMS — Fire/hotspot data
• Open Infrastructure Map — Global infrastructure networks
• Windy — Live weather map

Geolocation Tools

• Mapillary — Crowdsourced street-level imagery
• KartaView — Open-source street-level imagery
• Overpass Turbo — Advanced OpenStreetMap queries
• SunCalc — Sun position for chronolocation
• GeoNames — Geographical database
• PeakVisor — Identify mountain peaks
• GeoGuesser tips — Geolocation methodology

Street View: Google Street View, Apple Maps, Yandex Maps, Baidu Maps

Flight OSINT

• FlightRadar24 / FlightAware / RadarBox
• ADSBExchange — Unfiltered community ADS-B feed
• Planespotters — Fleet/airframe history by tail number
• AirFrames / JetPhotos — Visual confirmation

Maritime OSINT

• MarineTraffic — Live AIS vessel tracking
• VesselFinder — Global ship movements and port calls
• FleetMon — Historical AIS data and analytics
• Global Fishing Watch — Fishing vessel behavior and AIS gap analysis

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AI-Assisted OSINT

Warning: Never paste PII, sensitive IOCs, or unique pivots into cloud LLMs. They log inputs and may use them for training. Use local models (Ollama, LM Studio) for sensitive analysis.

Tool	Strength
ChatGPT (paid)	Log parsing, dataset analysis, Code Interpreter for CSVs/JSON, GPT-4 Vision for image OCR
Claude (paid)	200K token context for large document dumps and report synthesis
Gemini 1.5 Pro	2M token context; Deep Research mode with citations
Perplexity Pro (paid)	Real-time web search + reasoning; multi-query synthesis

Local/privacy-preserving: Ollama (Llama 3, Mistral), LM Studio, GPT4All

Commercial AI OSINT Platforms

• Cylect — AI entity extraction and link-analysis
• Fivecast Matrix — Generative-AI triage for social-media datasets
• Recorded Future — AI-driven threat intelligence
• DarkOwl Vision — AI-powered darknet data analysis

Deepfake & Synthetic Media Detection

• Sensity AI — Deepfake detection
• Reality Defender — AI-generated content detection
• Adobe Content Credentials Verify — C2PA verifier
• CarNet — AI car model identification (useful for geolocation)

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Archiving & Evidence Preservation

• archive.today — One-page content archiver with screenshot
• URLScan.io — On-demand webpage scan with resource map
• ArchiveBox — Self-hosted archiving (HTML, PDF, screenshots, media)
• Hunchly — Evidence capture for investigators (paid)
• Wayback SavePageNow API v3 — On-demand archiving with job IDs
• SingleFileZ — Browser extension for offline HTML archives
• Kasm Workspaces — Containerized OSINT workspace/browser isolation

Evidence handling:

• Capture: URL + timestamp + PNG screenshot + WARC/SingleFileZ archive
• Hash all downloaded files (SHA-256) and record in case notes
• Separate work profiles/containers per case; store evidence read-only
• Use JSONL (NDJSON) logs with run_id and tool versions for reproducibility

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Automation & Workflows

• n8n — Self-hosted workflow automation (e.g., RSS → scrape → alert pipelines)
• Huginn — Agent-based monitoring, scraping, alerting
• Playwright — Headless browser automation with stealth plugins
• Browsertrix Crawler — Archival crawling with WARC export
• Prefect / Apache Airflow — Workflow orchestration for data pipelines

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Regional Search Engines

• Russia/CIS: Yandex, Mail.ru Search
• China: Baidu, Sogou, 360 Search
• Russia social: VK, OK.ru
• China social: Weibo, Bilibili, Zhihu, Douyin

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Telegram & Messaging Intelligence

• TGStat — Channel analytics and search
• Telemetr — Channel growth, overlaps, forwards
• Combot — Group analytics (partially paid)
• TelegramDB Search Bot — Basic Telegram OSINT
• Discord ID — Basic Discord account information
• Sogou Weixin search — WeChat Official Accounts content search
• View public Telegram channels: https://t.me/s/<channel>