Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the act of gathering and analyzing publicly available data for intelligence purposes. In cybersecurity, OSINT is used to better understand the threat landscape and help defend organizations and individuals from known risks within their IT environment. OSINT can be used to gather information on potential security threats, such as terrorist activity or cyberattacks, and to gather information on competitors, industry trends, and consumer behavior.
Within cybersecurity, there are two common use cases for OSINT: measuring the risk to your own organization and understanding the actor, tactics, and targets. Measuring your own risk can be challenging due to the sheer volume of OSINT data, which is dispersed across many different sources. It is important that the high-value, relevant information gathered through OSINT activity is then integrated with cybersecurity tools and systems.
OSINT skills are the abilities and knowledge necessary to collect, analyze, and use information from open sources for various purposes. Hackers often use OSINT techniques to gather information about potential targets, such as using publicly available information from social media, websites, and news articles to gather information about an individual or organization.
OSINT tools can be invaluable for handling internal processes such as brand protection, workplace and facilities safety issues, real-time event monitoring, executive protection and force protection, and natural disasters and incident response. Open source threat intelligence software is essential for any enterprise using public data sources to inform their decision-making.
Flare’s SaaS Platform automates identification, collection, and structuring of OSINT data across the clear and dark web. Their platform continuously crawls the clear web including sources like public GitHub repositories, Stackoverflow, Google Dorks, and paste sites in addition to thousands of dark web forums and marketplaces to provide CTI and SecOps teams with actionable intelligence on day 1.
