What is OSINT?
OSINT stands for open-source intelligence: information gathered from sources that are publicly available, rather than obtained by hacking, deception, or insider access. The name comes from the intelligence and journalism worlds, but the same techniques are now cheap enough that anyone — a curious stranger, a scammer, an abusive ex-partner, an employer — can run them against an ordinary person in minutes.
What counts as "open source"
"Open source" here has nothing to do with open-source software. It means any source of information that does not require breaking a law or a system's access controls to reach it. That is a much larger category than most people expect. It includes things you deliberately published, things you forgot you published, and things other people or systems published about you without you doing anything at all.
Where the data actually comes from
OSINT is not one technique — it is a collection of very different data sources, stitched together. The main categories that this site catalogues are:
Public records
Government and corporate filings, property and business registries, court records, and other data that is public by law or by design.
Social media and forums
Posts, profiles, usernames, connections, and location metadata people share themselves, often across more platforms than they remember.
Breaches and leaks
Data that was never meant to be public — old account databases, credential dumps — but has ended up circulating anyway.
File and image metadata
Hidden details embedded in documents and photos, like device information, software versions, or location data attached to a file.
Infrastructure
Domains, IP addresses, DNS records, and other technical footprints that reveal who runs a service and how it is connected to other things online.
Why it matters even if you are not a target of interest
A common assumption is that OSINT is something that only applies to public figures, journalists' subjects, or people under investigation. In practice, the same techniques are used at a much smaller scale constantly: to check a date before meeting them, to find leverage in a personal dispute, to build a profile for a scam, or simply out of curiosity. Most of what makes someone findable this way is not one dramatic leak — it is the ordinary accumulation of small, individually harmless pieces of public information that add up to a detailed picture when someone bothers to put them together.
Understanding how that picture gets built is the first step toward controlling what is in it. The next guide, how OSINT techniques work, walks through the specific methods behind each of the categories above.