👋 Welcome to the 89th issue of The OSINT Newsletter. This issue contains OSINT news, community posts, tactics, techniques, and tools to help you become a better investigator. Here’s an overview of what’s in this issue:
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OSINT Trends for 2026
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Office Stunt Doubles
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Offline OSINT
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More internet archives
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Investigating shadows
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Searching for groups
🚨 We are launching the OSINT Newsletter CTF, a continuous Capture the Flag series designed to help you practise OSINT techniques in a structured, repeatable way, directly aligned to the topics we cover each week in the Newsletter.
The OSINT Newsletter CTF is now live.
🪃 If you missed the last newsletter, here’s a link to catch up.
⚡ Image OSINT that Goes Beyond Tools
Let’s get started. ⬇️
📰 OSINT Trends for 2026
Kirby goes through her top 3 trends for OSINT in 2026. AI-generated content validation, agentic AI, and synthetic influence campaigns, oh my! Definitely worth the read going into the new year.
🎩 H/T: Kirby Plessas
📰 How tiny details expose Putin’s location
Body double? No. Room double? Yes. Read how tiny details in photos reveal a presidential shell game. Sadly these are some of the methods some use to dox people. It all depends on the context.
🎩 H/T: Antonia Langford
📰 Ghosts in the Graph
Some of the most impressive people I’ve ever worked with were masters of the obscure. They were well read on fringe cults, counterculture movements, and other zeitgeist. They had one thing in common. They were well read. Justin talks about how sometimes the best sources are offline, in the form of obscure books.
🎩 H/T: Justin Seitz
🔎 Anna’s Archive
It’s a giant, searchable archive of books, papers, magazines, and more. It’s free and crowdsourced. You can train LLMs with it. Check it out.
🔎 ShadeMap
You have an image with shadows. You don’t know when the photo was taken. You can use ShadeMap to analyze the image, focusing on the shadows, to chronolocate a photo. You may also have a time but not a date, also useful.
🔎 Waybien
It’s a search engine for Telegram, Facebook, Discord, and WhatsApp groups. Results are limited but so are options for finding online groups from search engines. It’s a promising start.
✅ That’s it for the free version of The OSINT Newsletter. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support this publication and independent research.
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⚡ Investigating X Account Locations at Scale
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X has a new feature that shows you which country an account is based out of. While it may not always be accurate, it’s another datapoint to consider. In this issue, I create a browser extension that analyzes a profile on X, collects all quotes and retweets, and fetches the account location of each. You can use it to investigate influence campaigns and other use cases.
👀 All paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!
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