OSINT Bay Blog

Most "people search" tutorials end where the real work begins. They show you how to type a name into a free aggregator, screenshot the result, and call it intelligence. That's not OSINT. That's typing. Public records — the actual ones, filed with governments — are where investigations live or die. Court dockets, co…

You don't need a zero-day. You need a name and forty bucks. That's the unglamorous truth about PERSINT.PEOPLESEARCH — the layer of people OSINT that runs entirely on aggregators, data brokers, and the receipts of every "I agree" button a target has clicked since 2008. This isn't hacking. It's reading the file the bro…

A phone number is not eleven digits. It's a key. It opens messengers, banking sessions, two-factor codes, abandoned dating profiles, decade-old forum signups, and — if you know how to ask — the carrier's own routing database. PERSINT.PHONE is the discipline of turning that key into a person. This is the sub-directi…

An email address looks like a single string. To a working OSINT operator, it's a key that unlocks a phone number's last two digits, a Google review trail, three breached passwords, a GitHub commit signed with a real name, and a Skype handle the target forgot they ever had. PERSINT email investigation is the discipline …

People rotate phones. They scrub their Facebook. They burn email addresses every six months. The one thing they almost never change is the handle they picked at 14. That handle is still on their Steam profile, their abandoned LiveJournal, the GitHub repo they started in college, and the forum where they argued about Wa…

One photo, thirty minutes, and a fugitive who'd been hiding for three decades was back on the front page. That's what facial recognition does in a serious OSINT workflow — and that's also exactly why it scares regulators. Facial recognition is the loudest sub-discipline of IMINT (Imagery Intelligence) right now. Not …

An employee in Hong Kong watched her CFO and several colleagues join a video call. Familiar faces. Familiar voices. She wired $25.6 million across 15 transactions. Every face on that call was synthetic. That's the IMINT deepfake problem in one sentence. Not a future risk. Not a research paper. A line item on a forensic…

Pixels lie. The job is to make them confess. IMINT forensics is the part of imagery intelligence that doesn't care what the picture shows — it cares what the file betrays. Every edit leaves a fingerprint somewhere: in the compression grid, in the sensor noise, in a shadow that points the wrong way. A working analyst …

In December 2012 a journalist published one photo of John McAfee, on the run from Belize police. One photo. Inside the JPEG sat an unstripped GPS tag from an iPhone 4S — 15°39'29.4"N, 88°59'31.8"W — a poolside in Parque Nacional Río Dulce, Guatemala. McAfee tried to claim the data was faked. Two days later he co…

An image is rarely just an image. It's a timestamp, a location, a face, a logo on a wall, a reflection in a window — and somewhere on the public web, there's a chance it's been posted before. Reverse image search is how you make that chance work for you. Done badly, it's a single drag-and-drop into Google. Done prope…