OSINT Lovers Gift guide

It is the holiday season and I thought I would give you my guide to the ultimate gifts for the OSINT analyst/investigator in your life. While I am posting this pre-Christmas, this list works for any holiday, even birthdays. Trust me, your OSINT fiend will love these any time.

OSINT gifts should most likely come in the form of software to use in investigations, however I added a couple hardware options as well. In no particular order:

Yubikey - from $25 Your analyst is going to highly value 2-factor authentication methods and Yubikey is the top of the security heap for this. Get this one and if they don’t already have one, it is a guaranteed win. You might go up a few notches in the perceived intelligence ratings as well.

1password - from $2.99/mo Speaking of security, password security is no joke. A password manager is a critical tool for someone with a number of accounts to manage. There are a number of managers out there, some free, like Keepass, and other low cost options like Dashlane and Lastpass. The preferences are subjective, but I find 1password might be the most popular among the security conscious OSINT analysts.

Maltego - from $999/year This one has a hefty price tag and the OSINT analyst will probably want to purchase additional “transforms” available from a number of sources, but it is a killer tool, capable of making a complex case easy to explain. It can trace bitcoin, website registrations or social network contact lists like a dream. It’s a very capable but relatively inexpensive (compared to the others in this class, like Analyst’s Notebook, below) link analysis tool that has weathered over a decade on the favorites list for many an OSINT investigator.

Builtwith Advanced - $99/year Get unlimited domain lookups with Builtwith for a low price. This is a fraction of the total Builtwith tool, but the most critical piece for OSINT analysts and investigators. For this low price, unlimited lookups can get you details like software used in building a website, including past builds, IP addresses and analytic accounts as well as ties to other websites using those IPs and accounts. It covers a good chunk (but definitely not all and not as far back into digital history) of what the DomainTools account does at a fraction of the price.

Norton VPN - $39.99/year There has to be a VPN on this list and Norton is my go to for two solid reasons. First, the price. They seem to always have a sale ($39.99 when I last checked) but even their regular price of $79.99/year is around the price of many of the competitors’ sale prices. The second reason is that Norton has been a trusted name in computer security for decades and you are only as private and secure as your VPN.

DomainTools Personal Membership - $995/year The personal membership for DomainTools has a limited amount of searches per category per month, but can be invaluable for OSINT research. DomainTools has a unique data set of internet history going back into the 1990’s that exists nowhere else. This is an invaluable tool for a researcher who is working with a number of online websites.

Hunch.ly - $129.99/year This relatively low cost tool can help a researcher keep track of the investigation as well as provide reports. Why worry about archiving evidence when Hunchly will do it for you automatically as you navigate the internet. Every page is screenshot and the html recorded and searchable so that no shred of evidence is misplaced. A fantastic value.

Manual to Online Public Records - $44.99 Everything is online, right? Maybe. But some of the online details are not as accessible without the proper guidance, and the author, OSINT subject matter expert, and librarian, Cynthia Hetherington, guides us through public record databases like no one else can. Her books are used as textbooks. Check out her other book, The Guide to Online Due Diligence Investigations.

Extreme Privacy - $41.84 This is the only privacy book on the list, but it’s a doozy. Author Michael Bazzell knows privacy like no other and shows what extremes you can go to to be private in America today. Every OSINT researcher knows the value of privacy. Check out his other unique book, Open Source Intelligence Techniques, used as a textbook in some universities.

ARCGIS - from $100/year If your OSINT friend loves maps and geography, grab a membership to the top of the line geographic analysis tool. The online version for individuals is surprisingly inexpensive and sure to give a big Wow! factor to your gift.

Analyst’s Notebook - from $9610 While it is definitely not cheap, this analyst tool is one of the top of many an analyst wish list. Capable of link analysis, concurrent timelines and geographic analysis and more, this tool is heavily used in corporate and government analysis organizations and has been for years. Considered top of its class, this tool also does not require any expensive addons to fully function but may require some serious training for use.

Shodan - from $59/month Known as the search engine for the “internet of things”, if it connects online, Shodan can help you find it. Shodan is a unique search engine with some crazy capabilities and your OSINT fiend will love being able to identify how many Amazon Echoes you own and whether you have online security cameras or doorbells.

Babel Street or Fivecast - I have no idea $$ If you have a lot of money you don’t know what to do with, your OSINT fiend would love a license to something premium, like Babel Street or Fivecast Onyx. This type of software will allow the researcher to geofence locations or monitor complex concepts, get analytics and more. You know it won’t be cheap and you have to contact their sales team to even get a ballpark price, but if you are looking for a killer gift that will blow someone away, this will do it.

VMWare - from $119.20 I had to add a virtual machine to the list, and VMWare is the top of the heap here. This tool will allow multiple virtual machines in a jiffy and help protect the main machine from malware. But don’t get confused with VMWare’s fancy lingo. Apparently plain English is not a strong suit - you are looking through their long list of products for the Workspace Desktop Hypervisors, and choose the Fusion version for Macs or the Workstation Pro and Player versions for Windows and Linux.

Sophos Home - $35.99/year covering 10 machines Why pay for antivirus in the time of capable free antivirus software? Control, plain and simple. If you have multiple devices (and your OSINT friend probably does), Sophos Home will give you a control point to manage the antivirus accounts on each machine. This means you can tell when one gets infected with malware and you can make sure each gets their software updates. Not only is this great for a user with multiple machines, this is perfect for keeping all the laptops in a family safe.

And of course

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I wish you all the best in your investigations and happy holidays,

Kirby (and the crew: Kyle, Sarah and Heidi)