Quick OSINT Guide in 2020

Open source intelligence is rainbow

Happy new year 2020!!!! This year is very exciting for me. There will be the Tokyo Olympics 2020 and a movie of Evangelion will be released. That’s why I’m in excited.

I have learned English from Infosec Twitter and 31337 h4x0r(Also Google Translate). And I’ve been affected a lot. Then, I want to share my experience and knowledge for the community. That’s why I wrote this article. Thank you for all people.

Anyway, OSINT will continue to grow in demand. Why I love OSINT? In a nutshell, OSINT is in any case a basic part of the human. You will always use it in your life.

In this article, I’ll talking about OSINT, how I start OSINT, what is important. And this article is not like a “OSINT Resources” I want you to use this article as a “Learning method” or “Remember method”. but yeah, you know I’m Japanese, so I can’t write English well. I summarize my thoughts as a bulleted list.

OPSEC is most important:

If you’re researching sensitive information or access attacker’s infrastructure, OPSEC is most important things for you. I recommend you this slide. This slide made by The Grugq (OPSEC god).

1. Are you targeted by someone?
   Welcome to OSINT world! OK, Are you ready?? oh!! STOP STOP!!!! I forgot to mentioned about this. sorry!
   Before starting OSINT, You should consider whether there is any information contained in OSINT that gives you the reason to be targeted.
2. Thinking about how you protect from your OSINT target.
   I recommend to create a handle name and e-mail address to do OSINT. Never be confused with your life. and also I recommend to buy a PC to do OSINT. and I think, You want to know what OS is recommended by me? I can say, It’s depending what you research. You should think which OS is best by looking at its functions and reliability. and I think Tor is very good for you. But Tor is not 100%. You should use Tor and VPN depending on where you are going.
3. Disinformation
   Do you think Disinformation is only used by government operations? NO!! You can use it for protecting your real identity. If you penetrate into the hacker community, you need to be an actor and perform. When doing Disinformation you need to do it legally. Never use stolen passport. You’ll get in to jail.

How I start OSINT:

1. Lock on target.
   What is your target? You know some information for your target? And what you want to research? Username, email address, phone number, domain, icon, pictures.
2. Collect information from some sources.
   Intelx will great work for you. I use it everyday. Google is great too. Also, Awesome OSINT is super. Before starting collect information, I check it for some resources.
3. Analyzing collected Information.
   It is good to organize the collected information by time stamp or create graph with draw.io.
4. Saving evidence everywhere.
   You find something like a brilliant cut diamond? you should saving evidence as soon as possible. I recommend archive.is and archive.org. The Web Archive may disappear for some reason. In such a case, I recommend saving Web Archive of Web Archive. And more downloading webpage and take a screenshot.
5. Write a report.
   So, You’ll write report for your customer, Law enforcement or boss? You will write reports in a prescribed format. What time you got that information? Where is evidence? What is this evidence means? why you think this is legit?

What is important:

• You will learn the correct OPSEC every time you do OSINT. hahaha It’s funny.
• When you do disinformation, your target is doing the same. lie lie lie, everywhere. You should think what is true, which is lie.
• Sometimes you can’t find out truth with many time. But that is also an achievement.
• As I said before, OPSEC is most important thing. I say again, take care.

Conclusion:

OSINT is not an illusion. It just f**kin eat much time.

Thank you for reading my article. If you think this article is good, please share ;)