Page 57 - PPIAC 2021 - Annual Conference Presentation Materials 1_Neat

A well-equipped sleuth is like a master guitarist with a Gibson Les Paul custom guitar,
plugged into a Mesa/Boogie amp, sitting comfortably in their hands. When the pieces
all come together, beautiful music is made. If your reports are just a cut-and-paste of a
TLO slapped onto a company letterhead, you’ve failed to deliver a quality product to

your client. A Google search will net you the tip of an iceberg, but you’ll miss out on all
the relevant ice floating beneath the surface. This is where the deep and dark web come

into the fray. It’s there I discover a claimant claiming to be a vegetable is actually a real
estate shark using dummy companies to buy and sell houses. It’s there I find the illegal
selling of covid tests, sniff out the trail of a missing child, or uncover a subject who is
liquidating their assets and transferring them into another country. You miss all of that

if your reliance is on nothing but paid databases and surface level internet searches.

Open-Source Intelligence (or OSINT for short) is the process of combing through
publicly available data, cleaning the data located, analyzing the data for relevance, and
then delivering an assessment of the findings. It’s a powerful weapon utilized by
investigative journalists, data scientists, business analysts, cyber security professionals,

digital intelligence experts, and private investigators. An OSINT Analyst is another
term for ethical hacker. It’s ethical because our findings, and how we reached them,

must hold up in court. Cyber security analysts use a more aggressive form of OSINT
called active OSINT (contact is often made with the subject, whether directly or
indirectly). In the world of private investigations, we use passive OSINT (the subject is
unaware of our presence). Think of OSINT as a way of diving beneath the waves so you

get a better view of the iceberg. It’s a process of navigating the deep and dark web in
order to find the data you need.

A slight step-up from the use of paid databases are tools such as Been Verified, Pipl,
Spokeo, and the White Pages. By themselves, they are adequate but incomplete. An

essential key to a thorough investigation is a proper evaluation of the data. You must
cross-examine the provided information across multiple outlets in order to separate the
wheat from the chaff. The fewer data outlets you use, the less reliable your results

become. Even paid databases, like TLO and LexisNexis, can have outdated or mixed-up
information. A chief reason reports are left incomplete, unfiltered, and lacking a sound
analysis is because so much time is spent gathering data, little is left over for anything
else.