The Best Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Tools
Intelligence Fusion is a leader in open source threat intelligence solutions and has trained hundreds of analysts across the globe in OSINT collection. Based on years of experience and success, we've collated the ultimate list of open source intelligence tools and techniques for intelligence and security professionals.
What is open source intelligence?
Open source intelligence, or OSINT, is the collection and analysis of information that is gathered from public or open sources.
It’s also the foundation of Intelligence Fusion’s collection process. Our 24/7 operations team follow military intelligence principles to gather, evaluate and disseminate information from open sources.
Implementing theories such as The Intelligence Cycle means that we place emphasis on distributing accurate and actionable intelligence. From understanding the historical landscape of a region to precisely geolocating real-time incidents in each country, our analysts are meticulous in their work. Over the years, we’ve identified the best OSINT tools available online for every stage of the cycle.
What are the OSINT tools?
We’ve curated the ultimate list of open source intelligence tools, including resources for background reading, techniques for organising your research and websites that will help you get the best out of search engines;
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- The best OSINT websites for background reading
- OSINT techniques to organise your thoughts
- Setting up automated alerts using OSINT tools
- OSINT tools for social media
- Getting the best out of your search engine
- Open source intelligence platforms and dashboards
- OSINT website for online news media
- Other useful OSINT tools
For more OSINT insights and tailored threat intelligence, book a demo of our platform and try a 7-day free trial.
The best OSINT websites for background reading
This is a platform used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field. Academia.edu currently has over 22 million papers and over 144 million registered users on its platform.
2. CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE promotes free and unrestricted access to research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide. The public can search through a collection of over 125 million harvested research outputs, which can be downloaded free of charge.
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections.
Open Knowledge Maps presents you with a topical overview of your search term. It’s based on the 100 most relevant documents for your search term, which allows you to easily identify useful, pertinent information.
WolframAlpha is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from externally sourced “curated data”, unlike a search engine that provides a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer the searcher is looking for.
BASE is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines, especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 120 million documents from more than 6,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free.
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
This map identifies the locations and territories that are claimed by more than one country or occupying force.
OSINT techniques to organise your thoughts
Microsoft OneNote is a free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration. It gathers users’ notes, drawings, screen clippings and audio commentaries and allows your OSINT resources to be easily shared amongst other users online.
Setting up automated alerts using OSINT tools
Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service that can be used as an open source intelligence tool. It will send emails to you when it finds new results matching your specified search term.
Talkwalker is an alternative free alert system to Google Alerts that offers a higher level of customisation on alerts and notifications. Talkwalker can also monitor social media mentions of your specified search term.
OSINT tools for social media
The one million tweet map is a social media tool that you can use to visualise tweets and aggregated Twitter data in a world map. It can be useful when conducting real-time OSINT investigations.
Tweepler is a real time map of tweets coming from various locations. The tweets shown on the map are only fresh tweets. They are displayed as soon as received. No tweet location is older than a fraction of a minute.
Hashatit.com is a social search engine for hashtags. You can search tags across all social media platforms, bringing everything relevant to your OSINT research to one place in real time.
Picodash is another Instagram search engine OSINT tool to help you to search and analyse Instagram content by location and hashtags.
TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for the management of Twitter accounts. OSINT analysts can create live feeds of tweets to monitor specified hashtags, handles or mentions.
Getting the best out of your search engine
The following list will provide open-source tools and software that offer alternative search engines to better, and more easily, find what your looking for online.
Newslookup.com is a news search engine, news headline, news feed and news services provider that crawls several thousand news media sites providing time-based live rundown of headlines by region, topic or person.
Cluuz is a search engine that can be used as a really useful OSINT tool. Cluuz shows not only links to related pages but also entities and images that are extracted from within the search results. In addition to the results, Cluuz displays a tag cloud of the most relevant entities extracted from returned results.
Open source intelligence platforms and dashboards
There are numerous open-source intelligence platforms that you can access for free online. The aim of Intelligence Fusion is to collate all of this information and provide a single point of reference for users rather than work across multiple tools and platforms.
If you’re looking for something specific, however, you can check our list of OSINT dashboards specialising in tracking infectious diseases, human trafficking, and even marine vessels.
HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases.
HTS produces a weekly blog, publishes research, and hosts a global resource database on human trafficking and modern-day slavery.
MarineTraffic is a provider of ship tracking and maritime intelligence. Monitoring vessel movements to build a base of data gathered from our network of coastal AIS-receiving stations supplemented by satellite receivers.
Iris is an application developed by the World Customs Organisation that monitors open source information and presents this information in a graphic-style world map in real-time.
This live map from ICC shows all of the piracy and armed robbery incidents reported to IMB Piracy Reporting Centre.
ACLED is a real time data and analysis source on political violence and protest. As an OSINT tool, analysts and researchers can use ACLED for the latest reliable information on current conflict and disorder patterns.
OSINT websites for online news media
With hundreds of thousands of headlines and news stories published daily, it can be difficult to find what you’re looking for. This list of OSINT websites for online news provides a valuable selection of news aggregators and databases that can offer you easy access to the latest articles from all of the world’s online news publishers in one place.
NewsNow aims to be the world’s most accurate and comprehensive world news aggregator, bringing you the latest global current affairs headlines.
AllYouCanRead.com is the largest database of magazines and newspapers on the Internet, with listings for about 25,000 magazines, newspapers and top news sites from all over the world.
Newspaper Map is a free web app that helps you find over 10,000 of the world’s online newspapers, and in many cases, get to their Google translations in one click.
Monitor web pages or feeds for changes as an open source intelligence tool. Distill runs in your browser to check monitored pages for changes and can send you instant alerts via SMS or email as soon as a change is detected.
Feedly is a news aggregator application that can be used to compile news feeds from a variety of OSINT websites and online sources and allows you to customise and share with other users online.
Other useful OSINT tools
There’s an abundance of further OSINT tools that you can use as part of your open source collection efforts, with new resources and software becoming available all of the time.
1. IntelTechniques and Image Search
6. Naval Open Source Intelligence
9. Police Sites
Intelligence Fusion uses these sources, teamed with military-grade processes and structure, to enable a new way of thinking, encouraging analysts to adopt alternative mindsets to better discover, evaluate and understand threats of every kind. As part of our open source intelligence course, we provide extensive training on the most effective way to use these OSINT tools as well as an impressive and diverse range of additional modules, all built using real-life experiences from our ex-military and intelligence expert team.
For security teams across the globe, there is an additional challenge of being able to contextualise all of the information that can be accessed from such open source intelligence tools in order to better interpret information, provide real insight into threats and act quickly in response.
We’ve produced a step-by-step guide to building an effective threat intelligence program for security and intelligence leaders. Our guide provides advice on key considerations, actionable tips, and helpful resources to ensure that your intelligence unit is a success.
To learn more about how threat intelligence and OSINT data can mitigate risk in your business, book a demo today.
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