OSINT techniques are used by all investigators and analysts across the globe and in a wide range of industries considering from a local social media agency to tech giants like amazon, facebook inorder to understand the market and perform a better market research.
The below are the most common uses of OSINT -
Discovering publicly accessible internal assets -
OSINT analysts uses a variety of OSINT techniques in order to discover an organizations publicly accessible assets. OSINT analysts are experts in finding buried from search engines and web pages. They also find and locate all the organization's information that has been leaked on internet and also helps in removing them
Protecting brand reputation and trust -
Brand reputation is the most important thing for a company or organization. Preserving the integrity of your brand is certainly of the difficult task but OSINT analysts can help an organization in maintaining their brand reputation by detecting all the breaches and data exposures early and can help them to take safety measures. Also, OSINT can be used to find honest reviews and opinions of public regarding the organization and can help them in improving by detecting social media mentions of that organization on internet.
Cybersecurity Operations -
Ethical hackers and cybersecurity professionals uses OSINT techniques to find potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities in computer networks, systems and in other technologies. Commonly found weakness includes -
Unpatched software such as websites running older versions of CMS
Unsecured IoT vulnerabilities
Open ports and unsecured connected devices
Exposed assets such as IP addresses, network name, and software version
Social Media Investigations -
As the number of users on social media sites is increasing day by day, it has now become an important part of osint. It is used for finding the following information -
Social activities like posts, photos, location pins, comments, and event RSVPs
Personal information such as names, aliases, birthdays, email addresses, education, career history, and more.
Interpersonal connections like friends, families, followers, and followings
Theme-based groups, communities, and memberships
Risk Management and Fraud Investigations -
OSINT techniques can also be used for finding fraudulent activities on the internet. It is very helpful for collecting data about a scam company or product, also it can be used to identify phishing websites. OSINT also helps in risk management across incidents of reputation management issues during new product releases from incidents like in-store violence to more serious issues like natural disasters.