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OSINT Blog
Using Satellite Images and Machine Learning to Track Illegal Amber Mining in Ukraine
Ukraine’s northwest was once covered in lush pine forests. Now, much of the ground where these trees once stood has been turned into cratered, moon-like landscapes. The culprit: illegal miners who are digging up the earth searching for amber.
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From Checklist to Checkmate: How to Really Know Your Client
Does your customer know you better than you “Know Your Customer”? Over the past two decades, U.S. regulators have handed out billions of dollars in fines and deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) for the facilitation of money laundering, sanctions evasion, or terrorist financing. But the $2 trillion worth of suspicious transactions detailed in last…
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Dirty Money’s Selfie Habit: The Digital Face of Financial Crime
If you can’t “follow the money” on paper, follow it on Instagram. Since the phrase was coined in the 1970s, financial crime and corruption have undergone a digital transformation in more ways than one. Dirty money may be laundered on paper, but it’s aired in real life: and these days, much of real life is aired online. With financial criminals…
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Dictators, Spy Planes, and Twitter Bots: How to Leverage Open Source Flight Data for Your Investigations
“A dictator's plane landed in #GVA [Geneva] airport: 4K-AZ888 used by the government of Azerbaijan (Gulfstream G450) on 2020/10/08 at 12:10:14.”
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Knowledge is Power: OSINT and the Art of Law
In conflict environments, characterized by uncertainty and complexity, knowledge is power. Successful campaign strategy depends on understanding, controlling, and dominating the environment through actionable intelligence.
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How OSINT Took Down the Dark Web’s Silk Road
Though the Dark Web has been around since the early 2000s, it entered the lexicon of mainstream popular culture in 2013 after the high-profile FBI bust of a Dark Web site called Silk Road, an anonymous narcotics website run by 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, code name “Dread Pirate Roberts.”
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Surface, Deep, and Dark Web: OSINT Applications
There are many metaphors for the internet: an iceberg, an ocean, a superhighway, or even a coffee shop with a thousand rooms. In reality, the sheer size of the internet can be hard to conceptualize. Think billions of users, over a billion web pages, and more and more data in the form of text, images, and videos being added every second.
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Outrageously Priced Wayfair Cabinets Lead to Human Trafficking Conspiracy
Wayfair, an online e-commerce platform specializing in home decor, has become the subject of internet human trafficking theories based on some exorbitantly priced cabinets. The sudden popularity of this conspiracy has been likened to a similar, now-debunked child trafficking scandal dubbed “Pizzagate” in 2016.
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Twitter's #OSINTForGood Community is Saving Lives
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), or the analytical product of raw, publicly available data, has applications in threat protection, ethical hacking, competitive intelligence, and almost any online investigation. OSINT tools like Skopenow are frequently used by businesses in government, law enforcement, insurance, cybersecurity, private investigation,…
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8 Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Myths
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is an up-and-coming industry used by many companies that are looking to take advantage of the digital world. However, there are a lot of misconceptions about what OSINT is and how it can be used. To help, we’ve put together a list of the following eight OSINT myths to clear things up.
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