OSINT

Definitions

1. Open Source Intelligence, the practice of collecting and analysing information from publicly available sources to produce actionable findings. Sources include search engines and cached pages, social media and its metadata, corporate filings and court records, domain registration and certificate transparency logs, job postings that disclose internal technology, and imagery from satellites and street-level photography. In security work OSINT is the reconnaissance phase, mapping an organisation's attack surface, staff, and technology stack before any system is touched, which makes it both legal and largely undetectable. The same techniques serve journalism and conflict verification, where groups such as Bellingcat have used geolocation and chronolocation of public imagery to establish facts. The discipline's hard part is not collection but corroboration and disciplined handling of what turns out to be false.

   In plain English: Gathering useful information from things that are publicly available online — social media profiles, public records, website details — to investigate people or organizations.

Related Terms

• Social Engineering
• Red Team
• Content Disarm and Reconstruction
• Dumpster Diving
• Fingerprinting
• Memory Forensics
• Network Forensics
• Nmap Scripting Engine
• Open Source Intelligence
• Port Scanning
• Access Broker
• Account Enumeration
• Active Scanning
• ARP Cache Poisoning
• Banner Grabbing
• Confusion
• Counterintelligence
• Memory Scraping
• MITM
• Passive Reconnaissance
• Responsible AI Security