OSINT Resources for Investigators

Directory of open source intelligence (OSINT) tools for online investigations, research, due diligence and background checks

Make a plan and know where to look before you begin mining for OSINT. Are you looking for an address? Email address? Phone number? Political leanings or other personal details? Depending on what kind of information you are seeking, there are many online avenues, both free and paid-for, that you can take to get it.

To counter the first problem, we have included a list of toolkits provided by other OSINT practitioners working to improve the state-of-the-art. To manage the second, we recommend that all tools be tested in a secure computing environment whenever possible.

No matter which tools you use, remember to capture anything important immediately upon discovering it. The internet is fluid and what you find one day could be gone the next. Hunchly captures pages as you search, leaving a full audit trail that will hold up in court, even when the pages are long gone.

Browse through the extensive list of links below to see 101+ OSINT resources and tools for investigators. If you can think of any good ones we’ve missed, please let us know and we will add them.

General OSINT Search

Many investigators begin with a general search using a variety of search engines. Google is always a great place to start, but you’ll be surprised by the different results you get when you use different open source intelligence tools.

Ask

Bing

Cluuz

Dogpile

DuckDuckGo

knowlesys

Exalead