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.

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.

Geoguessr is an online geography game. That may sound like the most boring thing you’ve ever hear but it’s actually very interesting if you’re a newbie in OSINT. A big part of OSINT is GEOSINT, that is, being able to look at a photo a understanding where it was taken using different techniques.

Geoguesser drops you into a Google street view session but without any of Google’s normal map aids such as links, bookmarks, etc and you have a time limit to find yourself on their map. If you can do it within a certain number of meters/feet, then you get more points.

One thing I’ve been doing as a part of my research into #OSINT as a future occupation is to scope out who is hiring, look up the company’s website and their employees LinkedIn pages to see what experience they have.

I don’t use a sock-puppet account for this, though I do have one. I actually want people to see me looking because when I start applying for jobs, I want my name to stick out. Also, I’m learning a lot about the OSINT job market by what these companies do on a day to day basis, and eventually I hope to make more contacts that can help with that.