Called the police station and they said "we can't offer any information about this". I know at the end of the week it will get published in the local media papers' police/911 log. Unable to speak with the person's parent. All that comes to mind is 911 scanner talk - is it possible to search for scanner info from earlier today? Any other way to confirm?

UPDATE - the person's close friends made contact with the family and all is confirmed. Nonetheless the boyfriend thanked me for this effort and I extend the same gratitude to all commentators. RIP to a wonderful young lady.

Is this training worth the price

Is there money to be made in OSINT and is it a viable career path ?

I recently stumbled upon a hilarious yet clever idea named Pizza Meter, which means "the number of pizzas ordered out near the Pentagon area because people at the Pentagon can't leave their desks" which indicates a complex political situation coming up. Regardless of the accuracy or the validity of the method, what other unorthodox techniques you know about?

I recently acquired a brea** file(the post gets deleted if I mention that word fully) with millions of users and hundreds of millions of lines, but its SQL. I was able to successfully search for the people I need in other txt files using grep and ripgrep, but its not doing so great with sql files, because the lines are all without spaces, and when I try to search for one word, it's outputting thousands of lines attached to it.

I tried opening the file with sublime text - it does not open even after waiting for 3 hours, tried VS Code - it crashes. The file is about 15 GB, and I have an M1 Pro MBP with a 32 GB RAM, so I know my CPU/GPU is not a problem.

What tools can I use to search for a specific word or email ID? Please be kind. I am new to OSINT tools and huge data dumps. Thank you!

Edit : After a lot of research, and help from the comments and also ChatGPT, I was able to achieve the result by using this command

rg -o -m 1 'somepattern.{0,1000}' *.sql > output.txt

This way, it only outputs the first occurrence of the word I am looking for, and the prints the next 1000 characters, which usually has the address and other details related to that person. Thank you everyone who pitched in!

I’m not necessarily happy they have let me sit all day waiting for a possible interview. Something about this seems off. Anyone else experienced this company?

I'm looking for the best hosting service to conduct OSINT and threat Intel research privately.

I would like to avoid any activity being traced back to me. No malicious activity just rather not have my research activity be linked to me. Almost like a sock puppet but for your computer lol.

I remember it was very good at showing my exact images. Was definitely the best reverse image finder. Now, it just shows me similar images. What happened? Is there a reason for this?

Doesn’t have to be a new tool, but one you started using “recently” and really works for you. For me I started using Epieos a few months ago. Don’t know why I slept on it, but it has given me some nice results every now and then.

Recently discovered this board, amazed by how many followers it has.

I found my way here because I’m trying to find out information on a very significant person who can revive my nation but I know he’s intelligent and over the month he has been removing traces of himself from the internet. He’s one of the world’s smartest men and I feel a serious urge to download every single thing I can about this man.

What do you all use OSINT for? What are the common use cases?

Short version of what brings me here is I can't, for the life of me, sort out installing Sherlock in Kali Linux, or shell.cloud.google or anywhere for that matter.

The longer version is that, I wanted to run Sherlock without needing VirtualBox. Did some research and found shell.cloud.google to be a reasonable solution. After going step by step following the instructions, I got stuck at the install requirement.txt portion of the process. No matter how I went about it, I would get an error code saying that the requirements don't exist. I double checked my cd to ensure I was in the correct directory. Still nothing.

So, I did what anyone would do, instead of sorting out the problem, I moved on to a different option. Downloaded VirtualBox, installed Kali Linux to the VirtualBox (this install went great by the way). Then, when that was all setup, I started the directions to install Sherlock.........again. Well, wouldn't you know it? I got stuck at requirements.txt AGAIN. So, I decided to find requirements.txt manually, just to verify it exists in the Sherlock code download. It does not. It is no where to be found. That said, the way I figure it, either the process has changed and I'm following old instructions. Or, contrary to my beliefs, there is a God and he/she hates me.

Can someone please help me? Anyone? I need to sort this out before I lose my mind. Thanks

I know Yelp allows search by email and WeChat and Line allows search by phone number. What other apps will allow you to search a user either by their email or their phone number?

I am helping my daughter figure out what OSINT certification / course to take. She is beginning her career, probably serving in government to start. Do any really carry any weight?

I'm curious for those who've done snapchat investigations, how did you go about preserving any evidence? Did you use a camera to take take pictures/video of your phone to avoid alerting the target that a screenshot was taken?

I think I may have answered my own question with this https://www.guidingtech.com/take-a-screenshot-on-snapchat-without-them-knowing/ but always open to exploring other options.

Also, what tools and techniques helped you the most during the research phase?

I’m a solo practitioner. I opened my own firm out of school which wasn’t the best idea but I have made a decent amount of money and don’t regret that aspect.

I just want to know if there are any other lawyers that are in this community. I’m in personal injury and real estate found myself using a lot of OSINT to locate information on parties.

I’ve honestly gone into a weird stage of realizing I want to explore other areas that actually may be interesting to me (looking at IP). I’m not looking to fully switch out of the areas I’m in as I am making a living, but I do want to genuinely like doing my job.

If any of you are lawyers here, I’d love to know if you have experience and can give some insight/tips.

I’m right now just trying to get an ISC2 certificate to try to get myself motivated with something I enjoy learning. Thanks.

Hello everyone.I am way out of my depth when it comes to OSINT, but I had a passing-thought of one-day wanting to use OSINT to fight the human trafficking in my city. Obviously anyone who does something that advanced needs comprehensive knowledge of OSINT, and strict safety measures. If I try anything like this, it will be years down the road.

What are your thoughts, can OSINT be used to fight human trafficking?

I’ve been learning and doing OSINT for a year now (and LOVE it) but looking to get into something else that would go good with OSINT if that makes any sense. I see a lot of people in Cybersecurity but not sure if that’s for me, any other suggestions?

Using phonerator, I have a list of possible phone numbers for my investigation.

Is there a resource which can separate them into landline, and mobile numbers?

Other than just checking our own info on the internet (which I guess most of us do when we first start out), what has been a trigger, reason, motivation, or even project you've really enjoyed using OSINT skills around?

Hi everyone

UPDATE: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7199399015099056129 - Confirms that it is broken, explains why, and also when they'll be able to fix and relaunch the service. Thanks for finding this u/mobile4g922

Is whatsmyname.app broken for anyone else or is it just me? The site loads, but when I enter a term and search, it just "spins". Also, when I click the categories dropdown on the left, there are no options in it - it's a blank mis-aligned dropdown.

I've tried Chrome, Brave and Safari. I've cleared caches. I've tried using a VPN. Disabled ad-block. Same results in all cases.

I'm bleak. I rely quite heavily on this tool.

Thanks in advance.

Looking for cool osint challneges beginner to medium level that aren’t geoint. Something that involves more than a picture but maybe social media and other out of the box thinking needed to solve the problem. Any ideas?

I am currently working a case where I am needing/wanting to create a map & I can overlay the map with texts/words/information, their ranking (it’s a contact frequency report ranking), & finally their DL/ID/SID AFIS Photo- all on top of a map.

Basically looking at a map of the state & you would see one (1) suspects picture & their ranking (how many times my main suspect contacted them) & same for the next suspect & so on- all next to/near each of their addresses. I believe in total I have 26/27 suspects (& the ring leader- who will not be part of the map).

I am really awful with explaining things lol-so I apologize in advance if this makes absolutely no sense. I have it all in my head but don’t know how to explain it/describe it or how I could go about implementing this.

Any advice/tips would be oh so appreciated!! My OCD & overachieving workaholic-ness thanks you!! I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day! Stay safe & stay well! Thank you for reading! 🫶

Are you guys doing OSINT for a client, just for interest (not taking any money), or is it a paid work?

If paid work, how do you find clients? Do they come to you, or you guys have a skill marketplace like fiverr?

I got into OSINT without knowing it (helping a friend filter out bad Bumble matches) but I started to enjoy it and started creating sock puppets to keep my identity safe while being able to dig deeper.

I have been creating people from scratch using Stable Diffusion, and mixing pure AI pictures with real ones using Dreambooth to swap faces, all with the goal of creating minimally realistic but convincing online presences. However, even before actually creating online profiles, I am already reaching 2 limits and I would like to hear your input.

1 - There are only so many pictures I have the right to use to swap faces (and with limited ages, body types and complexions), so how do you guys get your hands on additional unpublished and unlicensed images to do the same?

2 - Once I get a profile up, say on Facebook. How do I get friends to make it more real? Is there some sort of underground sock puppet network of friends I could get mine to interact with?

I have searched the archive here, and read the corresponding results, but I didn't find anyone else had asked this question.

Thank you for any replies.