OSINT guides & case studies
Working method, written up: how a research task is actually carried out, what each source can and cannot prove, and where the honest gaps are.
Username Triage: Turning a Handle Into a Lead
A repeatable first hour for any username investigation: confirming the handle is real, mapping it across platforms, and separating the person from the noise.
Geolocating a Photo in Six Passes
A structured pass through a single image — metadata, reverse search, terrain, infrastructure, signage, and time — that turns an unlabelled picture into a verified location.
Reading a Domain's Life Story: WHOIS, DNS, and the Wayback Machine
How to reconstruct what a website used to be, who ran it, and when it changed hands — using registration data, DNS records, and archived snapshots.
Where OSINT Stops: Legal and Ethical Guardrails for Researchers
Publicly available does not mean freely usable. The lines that separate legitimate open-source research from conduct that gets you removed from a platform or sued.
Case Study: Reconstructing a Vessel's Movements From Public Data
A worked example of building a defensible vessel history from ship registers, transponder data, port records and satellite imagery — and where the gaps have to be admitted.
Case Study: Recovering a Deleted Social Post
A practical reconstruction of what happens after a post disappears — archives, search caches, quote sites and reply threads — and how to tell a recovered copy from the original.