OSINT, especially the SOCMINT (Social Media Intelligence) specialty, is often focused on widely used social media platforms like Twitter/X, Facebook, etc. However, there are lesser-known alternatives, such as Usenet, that can be a goldmine for OSINT investigations.

This article is not only for OSINT practitioners but also for researchers and internet historians who want to understand the specific ins and outs of Usenet research.

What is Usenet?

Before diving into how to use Usenet for OSINT, let’s briefly cover what it is. Usenet, also previously known as “NetNews,” is a decentralized network of servers that provide access to the Usenet network. Usenet is not a product; much like Email or IRC, it is an open internet standard (NNTP) that anyone can use. In many ways, you can think of it as the message board cousin to Email.

My first job in IT was at a small company, “A,” that researched telephone data for a very large company, “B.” You see, company “B” was a huge multinational conglomerate with offices all over the world. This meant they had several telephony providers that charged them not only for actual phone usage but also for the phone ports in the PBX.

That meant I spent days each week researching which phone ports were actually used by calling the phone numbers with little or no usage. It was boring and tedious, to say the least, but at least I got to listen to some awesome podcasts when podcasts first started becoming popular.

My backup laptop is a Teclast F5. It has an 11.6″ touchscreen display, a Celeron N4100 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a soldered 128GB SSD (not NVMe). I’ve owned it since at least 2018, though it’s not my daily driver. For everyday use, I rely on a newer ASUS laptop with an i9 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of disk space. However, despite the superior specs, I often face issues with video and other drivers, particularly on Linux, and occasionally even on Windows. In contrast, the Teclast F5 just works.

Torsocks acts as a network wrapper around linux applications. This allows them to work on the Tor network where that might not normally be possible. If the application that you are working with already has functionality that allows it to take advantage of a SOCKS5 proxy, then you can use Tor’s built in proxy to do that. However if the application doesn’t have that functionality, you can try to use Torsocks instead.

For those who may not know, email is not owned by any one company. There are no copyrights or patents associated with email itself. It’s an open standard that evolves over time through RFCs. While individuals and companies are free to develop software—whether open or closed source—using this standard, the core of email remains unchanged.

My Suggestion: Make Metadata-Minimized Email the New Standard Currently, email consists of headers and a body. Even if the body is encrypted, the headers are not. These headers contain a significant amount of data that can be harvested, even if the message content remains unknown. This makes email inherently less private than other forms of electronic communication, and it’s one of its greatest vulnerabilities.

This post originally came from a reply that I made to a question that was asked on the r/tor subreddit.

So, you want to run the tor service on in Linux but not just with the Tor Browser. Let’s assume that you’re running a Debian-based Linux distro.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install tor torsocks
sudo systemctl enable --now tor

This will install the tor service and run it as a server as the “tor” user. Any program that you run that can use a SOCKS5 proxy can take advantage of this service by connecting to localhost:9050.

I’m not a David Bowie fan, but in the song Space Oddity, there’s this amazing line:

This is Ground Control to Major Tom

You’ve really made the grade

And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear

Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare

Sandwiched between congratuations to Major Tom and telling him that he has to progress to the next step of his mission, we find out what actually matters to the press (and the regular people): “And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear”. In other words, they don’t really care. This event is the first so everyone is excited because of that, but they don’t actually care about it really. They care more about Major Tom’s choice of fashion than about him or his mission.

A few months ago, I wanted to try to practice my OSINT skills by looking up missing people by checking out the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children website. One of the people that I was checking on was a 14 year old girl who had been missing for about a week.

I started by looking her up on Facebook and found 2-3 Facebook and Instagram accounts a piece. Nothing of them showed much activity. Then I spread out by looking at the friends that this person took selfies with first. One of the friends had a few pictures with this girl that were fairly recent and within the time that this girl was missing.

The 2020 OSINT Handbook published by i-intelligence is the latest edition that is currently on their website. i-intelligence is a training and intelligence advisory firm.

The 2020 OSINT Handbook is a 509-page list of web links in PDF format. If you were expecting anything more, then you would be mistaken. It covers topics including social media, message boards, people search sites, and government and real estate sites.

Are these links useful? Absolutely! While you have to expect any PDF from 3 years prior to have many dead links, especially when it comes to ever-changing social media related tools, there are many resources here that might prove invaluable that you might never think of using. However, a PDF is probably one of the worst ways of sharing this information. If these links were in bookmark html format, they could easily be searched and added to a browsers bookmark file. However, having them in PDF format makes them kludgy to use and requires that you copy and paste the links directly in a browser.

I want to get back into OSINT now that I’ve had a chance to step away for a while and gather my thoughts a bit. I guess I should start by saying that I’ve never worked in OSINT. What I did do is read and dabble in OSINT and I also took a couple of courses and then worked through about 50% of another (very long) course before stopping. Before I talk about how I’m going to get back into it, I should talk about why I stopped.