OSINT Bay Blog

Telegram is not a messenger. It is the open graph of every conflict, every leak, and every crime market that doesn't want to live on the open web — and most of it is publicly readable if you know where to point the camera. That is why SOCMINT on Telegram stopped being a niche skill around 2022 and became table stakes…

Reddit users tell strangers things they wouldn't tell their therapist. That's the entire SOCMINT pitch in one sentence. Where Twitter is performance and LinkedIn is corporate theatre, Reddit is where people argue about firearms, drug dosages, divorce strategies, ex-employers, and which town they grew up in — under us…

Discord stopped being "just a gamer chat" a long time ago. A 22-year-old airman leaked classified Pentagon documents on a server called Thug Shaker Central. The 2017 Charlottesville rally was planned over Discord servers. A scraper called Spy.pet sold over 4 billion messages from 620 million users for $5 a query before…

LinkedIn is the most cooperative target in SOCMINT. Users hand over their employer, education, certifications, project history, even who they report to — voluntarily, in indexed text, with photos. No other platform tells you in a single page who someone reports to, what stack they ship on, and where they were three j…

A clean Instagram profile is a confession in pictures. The owner just doesn't know it yet. Investigators don't read Instagram the way users do. The same photo of a coffee — the user is showing their morning. The investigator reads the wallpaper behind the mug, the brand of the laptop, the timestamp on the post, the c…

Facebook is still the largest, deepest, and most embarrassing public archive of human behavior ever assembled. It's also the platform OSINT operators keep being told is "dead." Both things are true at the same time. What died in 2019 was Graph Search — Facebook's natural-language query engine that let investigators a…

If you do SOCMINT, you live on X. Whatever you call it — Twitter, the bird site, the everything app — this is still where breaking news, war footage, market panic, and political miscalculation hit the wire first. The platform is messier than it was in 2022, the data is harder to extract, and half the tools you trai…

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is a discipline of restraint as much as discovery. Anyone can scrape a profile or run a username search, but professional investigators are judged on whether their work is scoped, lawful, repeatable, and safe — for them, for their subjects, and for the integrity of the case. This guid…

Open-Source Intelligence is a field built on acronyms. Whether you are a journalist tracing a sanctioned vessel, a corporate due-diligence analyst chasing a beneficial owner, or a SOC analyst pivoting on indicators, you will encounter a shared vocabulary that spans military doctrine, civilian forensics, and internet pr…

On April 7, 2026, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing alongside a restricted preview of its frontier model Claude Mythos. The accompanying technical blog described what was, in calibrated terms, a threshold event for vulnerability research: Mythos had autonomously discovered thousands of previously unknown security f…