What is OSINT training?

What is OSINT training?

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is the art and science of gathering intelligence from unclassified, publicly available — or open — sources. While these sources include offline resources like traditional mass media and directories, OSINT today is increasingly practiced online, making use of the ever-expanding wealth of user-generated content as new technologies and platforms bring more and more information into the public sphere.

The revolution in information technology has made open sources more accessible, ubiquitous, and actionable, but the sheer volume of information on the web can make it challenging to discover and extract key data without proper training and access to approriate technologies. OSINT training allows researchers and investigators to harness the distributed intelligence of the internet by equipping them with the tools, techniques, and strategies to uncover insights that would otherwise be hidden in vast quantities of structured and unstructured data.

Why get open source intelligence training?

While open source content is available for use by any member of the public, it can be difficult to access and exploit using traditional search practices. The way an average person might use a standard commercial search engine is perfectly effective for everyday use, it’s often inefficient for deeper investigative purposes, requiring manual input of nearly exact keywords and returning results as an unstructured list of matches. Even when narrowed to a particular social media application, manual data collection is complex and time consuming at best, delivering vast quantities of ill-focused information with no clear organizing principle. Moreover, traditional search practices miss information on the deep web — the parts of the internet not indexed by standard commercial search engines — and ignore shared content across pages.

OSINT training helps researchers and investigators search public resources more effectively both on- and offline, by equipping them with advanced tools, techniques, and strategies for content discovery and information extraction. The goal is to support intelligence activities by enhancing investigators’ ability to discover, analyze, corroborate, and make use of vast quantities of publicly accessible information. This unclassified data includes user-generated online resources like social media feeds, wikis, and discussion forums, but also databases and offline sources that often go untapped by professional collectors of intelligence.

KeyNorth Group’s comprehensive training programs are built on experience gained through close working relationships with various public sector groups, including government, regulators, and law enforcement. Our goal is to provide the OSINT tools, strategies, and groundwork knowledge to enable professional intelligence users to open new investigation possibilities using the best and latest intelligence-gathering techniques. If you’re looking to enhance the results and efficiency of background investigations, intelligence operations, criminal investigations, asset forfeiture/seizure investigations, regulatory inquiries, or other investigative work, OSINT training can help strengthen your intelligence production capabilities and allow you to turn information into actionable insights.

Contact us, to learn more about our training and professional services.