Salaheldinaz
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What was your OSINT highlight of 2021?
The OSINT highlight for me this year was a personal one, after over a decade in law enforcement I started in a full-time dedicated OSINT role in the private sector. It has been something of a whirlwind since then, but I’ve learnt more in the last 6 months than the previous few years combined.
What emerging (good or bad) trends did you notice over the past year?
I’ve noticed that OSINT is continuing to mature as an independent discipline in its own right, but public recognition of the true value of OSINT still has a way to go.
It seems that certain high profile news events attract ever larger numbers of amateur sleuths and part-time researchers, which is great and shows how OSINT is becoming more mainstream, but should come with a health warning. It’s very easy to fall the trap of drawing conclusions from unreliable data sources or making false equivalences. Verification of findings can be tedious but it’s massively important if you want to actually draw reliable insights from collected information.
Any favorite tool or technique that you tried in 2021?
My plate was pretty full with new OSINT tools and techniques throughout the year, so it’s hard to pick out one particular tool. I’d recommend anyone interested in infrastructure OSINT to check out the ProjectDiscovery Github repo, it has some fantastic little tools in there.
Also, if you want to start working with with APIs check out Postman, it takes a lot of the legwork out of managing multiple APIs and has a handy code translator so you can easily import your API request into scripts or tools.
How do you see the OSINT landscape changing in 2022?
I’m tempted to say Web3.0 purely for the buzz-word bingo score but in all honesty I’m yet to fully process what that will actually look like beyond a canny rebranding of existing technology.
It probably won’t be but I fervently hope the “Meta-Verse” will be the Google Glass of 2022.
Do you have a blog / Twitter account / Company that you’d like to share with the community?
You can follow me on @Webjitsu and my website https://webjitsu.xyz - if you do, I pinky promise I will get around to posting some interesting content once in a while ;-)
Anything else you’d like to add about The State of OSINT?
All hail the hive mind!
