OSINT Insider Issue #10: AI, Monitoring Tools, and the Future of OSINT
In this edition of OSINT Insider, we break down the ways in which AI has transformed OSINT in practice, the future outlook for OSINT as an industry, and monitoring tools that elevate capabilities.
This edition of OSINT Insider covers the impact of artificial intelligence on open-source intelligence (OSINT), legal developments affecting digital investigations, a newly reported WhatsApp spyware campaign, tools for collecting data from VK and Facebook, and a comparison of vessel-tracking platforms against OpenSanctions datasets. The following issue offers investigators, journalists, researchers, and analysts practical guidance on emerging OSINT tools, risks, and tradecraft.
The free version of this edition will cover:
Exploring the Effects of AI on OSINT Jobs
Detailed Breakdown of OSINT Sectors and Job Opportunities Within Each
The Latest Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community is Out!
How The SECURE Data Act Could Change the US Data Privacy Landscape
The British Virgin Islands Introduce a Potentially Dangerous Request System That May Put Investigators in Danger, Not Reduce Corruption
A New Social Media Monitoring Platform is Just “An AI Slop”?
New Reddit Monitoring Tool to See When & Where Relevant Information Is Being Discussed
A Real-time Container Ship Tracking Service
Real-time Database of Sanctioned Vessels Across 6 Jurisdictions: Can It Rival OpenSanctions Data?
How Places You Order Food from Can Reveal Your Location and Movements
Custom Search Engines in Google are To Be Gone by 2027
Impressive Updates for an AI-powered Fake Detection Tool
A New Alternative to The GDELT Project
A Discord Tools Collection with Unique Lookup Tools
New Tool Allows Users To View BlueSky Profiles
Twitter Geocode Searches Are Not Working Properly, and Ways Around It
A Search Tool for PSN, Steam, Xbox, and Nintendo Platforms
To support the efforts of our editorial team, we provide access to the full edition of OSINT Insiders to our paid subscribers only.
Speaking of our editorial team, OSINT Insider welcomes a new managing editor, Rachel Brooks, who is a founding team reporter from the OSINT-driven newsroom Overt Operator. Special thanks and welcome also goes out to Sofiia, and James as our writer/researcher dynamos!
The full edition includes The Com Corner section. This edition covers the points mentioned above, as well as the following:
Companies House Glitch Close to Exposing Data of Millions of UK Firms
Brand New Platform to Assess a Candidate’s Practical OSINT Skills When Hiring
Reddit Monitoring Platform that Keeps You Updated on Most Popular Discussions and Topics
New Extension that Pulls VK Data, Including Family and Engagement Data
Domain Intelligence Tool that Sweeps Over 800 TLDs
Tool Allowing Access to Reddit Without Connecting to Your Account
Method for Acoustic Keystroke Recovery Revealed
A Curated OSINT Tools Resource that Focuses Exclusively on Tools Used in Real-Life Investigations
An Alternative to Planet Labs Imagery
New Tool for Gathering Historical Data of Every IP to Ever Exist
New Tool for Monitoring Pastes from Termbin
XCancel Alternative that Allows Viewing of Tweets Without Logging In
OSINT Investigation Reveals UK-registered Crypto Exchanges Run by a Notorious Iranian Regime Supporter
New Open-Source WhatsApp Spyware Implementation
Malicious Chrome Extensions Database that Provides Useful Historical Threat Intelligence Data
New Local Translation Tool Keeps Your Viewing History Confidential and Private
Advanced Repository for Image Matching
Another Web Intelligence Reddit Tool, ThinkPol Alternative
Tool Allows Merging Telegram Channels into One Chronological Feed
Will the new Google feature get in the way of Tools that Analyze Information Extracted from Google Accounts?
A New StreetView Processing Tool that Helps with Route Scanning and Analysis
China’s “Little Red Book”Becomes Valuable To Investigations
Recent OPSEC Risks of Using Instant Data Scraper and Why a Lack of Transparency May Not Immediately Mean Bad Intentions
A Repository for Finding Out the Identity Behind a Shared Link, A Potential Fork
An Alternative to Facebook Sock Puppets
A Library of Discord ID and Server Lookups, Templates, Embeds, and Webhooks in One Place
The Com Corner Section will look at the following:
The Com Community on Telegram Reacting to Our Expose of Them
TLO Data Lookup Tools With a Potential to Violate Someone’s Privacy
Previous Edition:
In the previous edition of the OSINT Insider, we looked at an OSINT company that provides more accurate results than FaceCheck or Pimeyes, ways in which the Com can bypass KYC security checks, and discussed a way to scrape subscriber information held by an Australian broadband provider. We also pursued ways in which investigators can find out more information on a shell company, even when they encounter a registered agent and new OPSEC risks…
Catch the full recap at the link below:
OSINT Insider Issue #9 - Australian Broadband APIs Leak Subscriber Info, Untapped Facial Recognition Tool, and New OPSEC Risks
In this edition of the OSINT Insider, we will look at an OSINT company that provides more accurate results than FaceCheck or Pimeyes, ways in which the Com can bypass KYC security checks, and discuss a way to scrape subscriber information held by an Australian broadband provider. Additionally, we will cover ways in which investigators can find out more information on a shell company, even when they encounter a registered agent and new OPSEC risks.
📌 How AI Transforms OSINT Jobs: The View Inside
OSINT Jobs conducted an OSINT practitioners survey in October 2025. This survey included OSINT and threat intelligence analysts, online investigators, and similar roles. The survey scope asked these collective practitioners how AI impacts their work and what changes AI brings to the field. The changes considered included new AI-associated challenges, skill gaps, and emerging AI-associated risks.
AI is reportedly being used to improve OSINT efficiency. The OSINT Jobs survey finds that AI is improving workflows for a variety of tasks. Tasks like complete data collection, large-scale data analysis, and data filtering and structuring, and writing reports are improved with AI use. Overall, the survey highlights that OSINT practitioners today need to bring a mix of technical and cross-disciplinary skills to the table to compete. A mix of methodological technical process and soft skills are in demand for new analysts. Things like writing, data analysis, verification and language skills are listed as high demand skills.
The trend this survey traces is in line with reports that AI’s take over impacts a clear-pattern of data entry and computer programming jobs, and not complex skills.
OSINT analyst roles demand more complex, human skills like interpreting data and connecting dots for investigations. Roles in OSINT are safe from AI elimination at present because of this. Recent research finds that AI is influencing OSINT by enabling analysts to do their jobs more quickly. Dr. Elena Taube Bailey, who spoke for a 2025 seminar on emerging technologies in OSINT, explained that OSINT is “supercharging” the unique value of OSINT. The AI tools are not detracting human value, but rather doubling its reach.
See the full survey breakdown at OSINT Newsletter’s OSINT Jobs.
📌 Got Jobs? A Breakdown of OSINT Career Paths
Also from OSINT Jobs, a comprehensive OSINT jobs taxonomy, outlines the various OSINT sectors and associated careers to explore. It is based on careful analysis of job descriptions, company profiles, and recent hiring patterns and is supposed to give a clearer idea of what sectors OSINT as a field entails and what career paths there are to go down. The OSINT Jobs service has been serving the community since 2021, and continues to track emerging trends in the field.
Here’s a quick look:
OSINT Jobs provided a color wheel (screen captured below) of six key areas where careers are growing:
Security Operations and Risk
Public Interest and Accountability
National Security and Government
Geopolitical and Strategic Intel
Cyber Threat Intelligence
Anti-Fraud, Financial Crime, and Compliance
Corporate Intel and Investigations
Navigating the color wheel highlights job titles in these key fields that are in hot demand at present. Some examples include SOC analyst roles for Cyber Threat Intelligence or Incident Responder roles.
See the job wheel at OSINT Jobs.
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Lenso.ai enables not only face search but also copyright image search. Besides that, you can use Research Mode to perform in-depth searches and take advantage of advanced filters. You can also integrate face search into your own system using our API.
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📌 Official 2026 U.S. Intelligence Threat Assessment Recap
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence published the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community earlier this year. It comes with a warning fort the growing risks the U.S. braces for from the following:
Transnational crime,
terrorism,
cyber threats,
Weapons proliferation (weapons of mass destruction)
the power competition with China and Russia.
The threat assessment also highlights technological challenges such as AI and quantum computing as future security concerns.
Regarding cyber threats, the report emphasizes the risk of malicious cyber-attacks on the US infrastructure posed by cyber actors from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The risk of cryptocurrency heists and North Korea’s use of unwitting IT workers or workers with falsified credentials is also discussed.
Read the full report here.
📌 How The SECURE Data Act Could Change the US Data Privacy Landscape
The SECURE Data Act introduced this April could affect OSINT platforms and tools by bringing legal risks. The law grants customers across the U.S. the right to access, correct, and delete their personal data, and requires companies to obtain explicit consumer consent before processing sensitive data.
Because of data minimization, in which the law requires data controllers to limit data collection to what is relevant and necessary, the law could disrupt and make OSINT work relying on easy data access and patching federal privacy laws more difficult.
The law is currently undergoing congressional hearings and is worth keeping an eye on as this is likely to affect our work significantly if a national data privacy standard is introduced.
Read the Secure Data Act’s legal text at Congress.gov.
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📌 Could the British Virgin Islands’ New Request System Put Investigators at Risk? the Breakdown
The British Virgin Islands, often criticized for being one of the world’s largest secretive offshore jurisdictions, has introduced a new anti-corruption system that allows journalists, NGOs, and other actors to request information about a company’s activities. Once the data request is submitted, the company has 5 business days to object.
Although some support this new rule, transparency advocates warn against this change because of the worry that it may effectively tip corrupt actors off, giving them time to move assets legally to avoid sanctions. This alert system may also put journalists and investigators at risk of retaliation, suggesting potential flaws in the new law.
The OCCRP has a detailed report on this subject that we highly recommend.
📌 New AI Social Media Monitoring Tool: Is It Innovation or AI Slop?
Monitory is a monitoring platform that allows users to track profiles across various social media, including Reddit, TikTok, X, Steam, GitHub, and the web. It can also send you alerts via email, Discord, or webhooks when new posts appear or content changes. Multiple scanners on different platforms for the same user can be created. The tool claims to also be fully anonymous.
There has been a discussion on Reddit about whether the tool is just an “AI slop” or was built by someone with experience.The developer of Monitory published a comment detailing their expertise and experience within the field of OSINT, as well as signposting to posts about the project being at different stages of development posted a while back.
Learn more at monitory.me
📌 New Reddit Tool Tracks the When and Where of Conversations
F5Bot allows you to monitor Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters simultaneously across posts, comments, and subreddits by keyword mentions, such as the name of a brand, person, company, or location. There are also filtering flags to further enhance the accuracy of monitoring. It is recommended to be specific with the keywords to narrow down the search. There is a daily search limit on the free plan. F5Bot returns context, timestamp, and the title of the post searched for when returning results.
The bot also supports Slack and Discord integration, which allows you to direct who gets alerted when a specific word is mentioned.
H/T 🎩 to OSINT Combine for bringing this tool to our attention.
Check it out at f5bot.com
📌 Container Ship Tracking Gets a Real Time Service
Flexport Atlas is a real-time container ship and shipping service tracking dashboard that provides a detailed description of a container ship and a port. The interactive map allows you to follow the shipment and see its path. In a way, it works similarly to FlightRadar24.
The Atlas also provides detailed specifications of a given ship.
Given the current geopolitical situation, the fact that the Atlas allows for monitoring the disruptions caused by the conflict in the Middle East is very useful as well.
Learn more about the tool at Flexport Atlas.
📌 Real-Time Sanction Vessels Tracker: Can It Rival Open Sanctions?
FleetLeaks is a real-time database that tracks over 900 sanctioned vessels across the US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It supports search by IMO, MMSI, and vessel name and is updated daily to provide users with the latest updates. It also compiles lists of the most active terminals across the regions.
The tool is built from official sanctions lists, maritime tracking data, and repeatable automation pipelines. Alerts to track specific vessels can also be created.
The tool provides comprehensive data on a given vessel, including its risk assessment, real-time movement (using OpenStreetMap view), recent operations it was involved in, what country it was sanctioned by, and when and where it was last inspected.
Yet, when compared to the information that OpenSanctions provides on the same vessel (through Advanced screening search, entity type “vessel”), it seems that FleetLeaks does focus on general information related to the sanctions as opposed to providing more in-depth information about the vessel itself. OpenSanctions returned a more comprehensive description of the oil tanker, including names of its captain and owner, and cross-references information clearer, which makes fact-checking easier. That said, FleetLeaks provided the vessel’s risk assessment and full port state control inspection history. It seems like the two databases could complement each other really well to provide a better overview of a given vessel.
Image sourced from Open Sanctions.
Check it out at fleekleaks.com
📌 How Your Food Order Can Leak Your Location, Movements
Zomato Intelligence is a tool that demonstrates a privacy issue in the contact recommendation feature of the Zomato app, a food delivery service. By syncing a target phone number, it can retrieve data such as a list of restaurants the person recommended, specific dishes they ordered from those places, and coordinates of the restaurant, which could reveal the target’s approximate movements and visited areas. Unauthorized access to this information could lead to legal consequences as it involves tracking someone’s movements without legal permission.
While the Zomato tool could be useful for monitoring or tracking purposes in an investigation, it should be used with caution, OSINT practitioners generally agree.
Insiders Note: OSINT manuals for code of conduct disciplines are varied, and practitioners debate the differences. We compared a variety of OSINT community codes of conduct, such as the UK OSINT Community Code of Conduct and the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, to see where these manuals generally reach consensus about a tool like Zomato Intelligence. The result of our comparison across community protocols and disciplines informed our final take on Zomato Intelligence in the above report.
See the tool breakdown yourself on GitHub
📌 Google To 86 Custom Search Engines in 2027: Why the Cut
There are changes coming to custom search engines in Google, which will no longer have the option to do a full web search, starting January 1, 2027.
Since many OSINT tools are built on the back of programmable search engines, it might be time to diversify your toolkit if you use any.
Yet, a small loophole was identified by Henri Beek: if you use filters to limit search results to just one country, you could then use “Sites to Search” to add 50 sites and search as *.nl/* and *.com/*. This will still limit your search results.
A full breakdown was reported by The OSINT Newsletter.
📌 A New Alternative to The GDELT Project
Geoconfirmed is a project that aims to geolocate and verify visuals from 17 conflicts happening around the world, as well as some conflicts that happened in the past. It is driven by volunteers, who monitor social media and news to identify imagery to be later verified using satellite imagery and mapping tools. The tool provides access to interactive conflict maps with sources and coordinates breakdown.
Learn how it works at Geoconfirmed.org
📌 The New Discord Tool Collection: What Stands Out
This Discord Tools Hub centralized a series of Discord tools, including tools for analysis, configuration, formatting, and generative features, as well as lookup and information tools.
The collection includes some unique lookup modules, such as those that check detailed information about Discord invites, including checking whether the URL you plan to use is already taken by another server, and if it is, the information associated with the service that hosts it. Other lookups include features such as viewing information about a Discord server and accessing application information.
See the new toolkit at discordgate.com /tools
📌 Searching BlueSky? New Tools Give the Bird’s Eye View
This free tool allows users to view BlueSky profiles without registration and access information such as profile photos, posts, likes, follows, shares, and profiles that have been blocked.
See the full toolkit on Github
📌 Ways To Work Around Twitter Geocode Not Working
Reddit users discussed how Twitter geocode searches have not been working smoothly in the last few months. On Reddit, users say that the geocode: operator, which used to surface geotagged tweets within a given radius, seems to be broken for recent posts and does not give effective results for exact phrase searches. Users claim that the from: + to: + exact phrase combo also breaks frequently as well.
To work around this, a Reddit user, Pristine-Ticket8822, suggested trying Google dorking with site:x.com, which might pick up on information that X misses. Because combining operators seems to be causing most issues, breaking up complex searches into smaller ones could also help.
AlerteGeo_OSINT on Reddit also recommended using the native X Advanced Search page, available here, as opposed to manual operators, which might handle complex searches better. The Wayback Machine’s CDX API could be useful for archival work as it can recover deleted tweet URLs if the status ID is known.
Catch up with the conversation on Reddit.
📌 Gamer Search Engine: Match Players To Platform Names
Player Search lets you search Epic players by their display name, account ID, or creator code, explore their profiles, and see linked profiles. Results can be exported from the tool as well.
This tool allows you to search across platforms such as PSN, Steam, Xbox, and Nintendo.
See more at epicgames.com/tools
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