OSINT Sources#
The data sources OSINT collection draws from. Coverage, cost, and legal authority differ by source; the operator picks the source that satisfies the collection requirement at the lowest OPSEC and legal load.
Source |
Description |
|---|---|
Search engines |
Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Kagi. See Search Engines. |
Code hosting |
GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, SourceHut. Commits, gists, issues, GHA logs. |
Paste sites |
Pastebin, ghostbin, justpaste; monitoring feeds. |
Social media |
X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, Mastodon, Bluesky, Telegram public, TikTok. |
Public records |
SEC EDGAR, OpenCorporates, court PACER, FOIA portals, land registries, CT logs. |
Archives |
Wayback Machine, Common Crawl, archive.today. |
News and media |
Google News, GDELT, Factiva, LexisNexis. |
Academic |
Google Scholar, arXiv, SSRN, PubMed, OpenAlex. |
Commercial brokers |
BrightData, Intelius, Pipl, Spokeo. |
References#
OSINT for the discipline overview.
OSINT Tools for the operator’s kit.
OSINT Techniques for the tradecraft.