The OSINT Guide
Author: SEARCH-ish Author
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g.) Crypto OSINT – Basic Ethereum Research
This post walks through standard research of an Ethereum address and its activity by using Etherscan.io
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f.) Crypto OSINT – NFTs
There are some basic research methods for an NFT. This will avoid the deeper questions of what is an NFT. So for now we’ll use the gross oversimplification of describing an NFT as a picture with a unique ID that people buy and sell with cryptocurrency. Let’s get started. For the sake of this example,…
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e.) Crypto OSINT: Tools for Crypto (just a list)
The following is simply a list of websites for researching crypto currencies.
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d.) Crypto OSINT – Smart Contracts
A smart contract is an independent automated contract on the Ethereum blockchain. It is written as code, stored on the blockchain, and automatically executed under certain conditions. Smart contracts are written in Solidity and can be investigated on etherscan.io to track functions and ownership. They are crucial for token/NFT transactions and liquidity pools.
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c.) Crypto OSINT – Exchanges, Mixers, and Coinjoins
Exchanges are platforms for converting cryptocurrencies or traditional money, often handling large fund volumes. Mixers blend funds in a pool, sending them anonymously to chosen addresses. Coin Joins combine multiple transfers into one transaction to obfuscate fund transfers, without a middleman. This method relies on multiple users and requires no additional fees or third-party trust.
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b.) Crypto OSINT – Pattern Analysis
Analyzing Cryptocurrency Address Behavior to Gain Insights into Owner Activities When analyzing a cryptocurrency address, exporting its transaction history to a platform like Google Sheets can provide valuable insights into the behaviors and possible characteristics of its owner. Google Sheets allows for basic data manipulation, making it a useful tool for anyone, regardless of their…
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Professional License Data
A surprising number of jobs require some form of state certification or license, which can provide good information about that person. This can determine if the person actually has their claimed profession, some personal details, and very often it will show any issues the person has run into. So in some cases a person had…
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Examine Emails (part 2 – links, images in email’s html)
Your email services will sometimes disable hyperlinks and/or block images in the email body content (thereby blocking images from downloading). And you might see this: Or this: You can look at the raw source code to find out more. But first, you need to understand what you are looking at in the HTML How to…
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Public Data in Criminal Justice Records
The primary resources are: People Search Websites: PSWs were discussed previously, they are a great first step when researching someone as they will identify where the persons lives now and past addresses. After you obtain this information look up the counties for each address and then you can search if the person was involved in…
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Examine Phishing Emails (part 1 – email header basics)
This is a basic post about the first step in examining an email for signs of phishing and at the end lists through key points about email headers in general. Decode UTF-8 coding of Subject LINE We start with basic email header info found using Gmail and how to decode certain parts of the coding.…
The OSINT Guide 