How Agencies Can Use Open Source Intelligence to Close Cybersecurity Loopholes

How Agencies Can Use Open Source Intelligence to Close Cybersecurity Loopholes

Over the past few weeks, I have been experimenting with the latest form of spycraft, though it was hardly what I was expecting. Sometime around the 1980s, the military and intelligence organizations started to allocate at least some of their covert resources away from traditional spying activities like embedding agents and trying to hack into classified networks. Instead, some resources were devoted to scanning public sources of information like newspapers and official documents. This kind of spycraft was dubbed open source intelligence gathering, or OSINT for short.


OSINT efforts got a big boost with the rise of the internet and then another huge one when social media went mainstream. Skilled intelligence agents no longer have to always cultivate sources in rival governments or perform dangerous operations in unfriendly territory. Instead, they can sometimes get just as valuable information by connecting the dots and linking several publicly available information snippets into a much larger picture. It’s still a lot of work, but mostly conducted from the safety of a computer terminal sitting at their office.


To speed up the data collection process, OSINT automation tools were created. They could be directed to collect general information about a topic or even tasked with answering specific questions using publicly accessible information. People realized over time that they could turn those same tools inward, checking to see if friendly organizations were accidentally sharing sensitive or secret information themselves. CSO Magazine asked me to evaluate several of the top OSINT tools available today, and it was quite an interesting experience.


There are two things that I found most surprising about OSINT tools. The first is that many of them are available for free, created by de ..

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