What is OSINT?
Open-source intelligence (OSINT) transforms scattered public data – from social media posts to domain registrations – into actionable security insights that help organizations identify vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them. This framework involves systematically collecting, analyzing, and interpreting publicly available information to uncover cyber threats, adversarial activities, and potential attack vectors that might otherwise remain hidden.
Ethical vs. malicious OSINT
Legitimate OSINT operations protect organizations by systematically analyzing publicly available information to identify security threats. Threat intelligence analysts and security experts collect data from websites, social media, public databases, domain registries, and even dark web sources to uncover both known vulnerabilities and emerging zero-day threats.
Malicious actors exploit the same techniques to reconnaissance targets and identify attack opportunities. For example, the rise of generative AI has led to a 1200% surge in phishing attacks since late 2022 as attackers search for accidentally exposed assets, leaked credentials, or misconfigured systems that can serve as entry points for coordinated cyberattacks.
Ethical OSINT follows structured methodologies like OWASP's six-step framework: target identification, source gathering, data aggregation, processing, analysis, and maintaining ethical boundaries. Tools like Intelligence X and Maltego facilitate this systematic approach to threat intelligence gathering.
Get a 1:1 demo of how Wiz shows which threats actually matter
See how Wiz ties threat intelligence to your real cloud environment – highlighting exploitable paths, exposed assets, and risks attackers can reach now.
Why is OSINT important?
Proactive threat detection drives the strategic value of OSINT for modern enterprises. Organizations use intelligence gathering, shadow IT discovery, and comprehensive risk assessment to identify security gaps before they become costly breaches, benefiting both through direct implementation and indirect protection via security providers.
How organizations directly benefit from OSINT
As an organization with internet-facing apps and services, conducting in-house OSINT operations offers you a wide range of benefits:
Early threat detection: Intelligence from hacker forums and underground sources creates an early warning system, revealing security weaknesses and planned attacks before they cause damage.
Enhanced defense mapping: OSINT reveals cloud misconfigurations and exposes paths to vulnerable public-facing assets, strengthening your overall operational security posture.
Supply chain risk assessment: Systematic analysis of third-party vulnerabilities helps you make informed decisions about software dependencies and vendor relationships.
How organizations benefit from OSINT indirectly
Security provider partnerships amplify OSINT capabilities beyond internal team capacity. Organizations gain access to specialized threat intelligence analysts who excel at identifying cloud misconfigurations—like exposed Azure Blob storage or AWS S3 buckets – that internal teams often miss.
Dedicated threat monitoring becomes feasible through provider partnerships. Security vendors invest significant resources in monitoring open sources for zero-day vulnerabilities and emerging attack campaigns, feeding this intelligence into comprehensive threat intelligence systems.
Actionable threat intelligence flows directly to CISOs and security engineers, providing current threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that enable informed decisions about critical infrastructure protection.
Top OSINT tools
Automated intelligence gathering transforms manual OSINT research from time-consuming investigations into efficient, systematic operations. The right tools can process vast amounts of public data, identify patterns, and surface critical threats in minutes rather than hours. Here are the top 9 OSINT tools (listed in no particular order) that streamline threat intelligence workflows:
1. Babel X
Babel X, powered by Babel Street, is a multilingual, AI-powered OSINT platform that scrapes and analyzes intel from publicly available information (PAI) sources, including social media, blogs, dark web forums, and more. Trained to understand 200+ languages, Babel X uses its advanced machine learning algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to filter noise from OSINT gathered and translate content into users’ preferred languages. It then indexes the data and highlights critical intelligence, optimizing your decision-making.
Features and use cases
Babel X supports active and passive scans, data visualization via charts, geospatial mapping, and more. You can conduct your OSINT on Babel X using Boolean searches for fast scans or configure searches by keyword, timeframe, geolocation, or file type for fine-grained filtering. You can also integrate its APIs to directly feed Babel X intel into your platforms for proactive threat detection.
2. BuiltWith
BuiltWith is a website profiling tool for analyzing the DNS records, content management systems, third-party libraries, and other IT infrastructure on which a target’s website is built. BuiltWith identifies the unique patterns left by even the most obscure infrastructure elements. It then stores all intel gathered in its indexed database, including historical data, such as when a certain technology was added to or removed from a website.
Features and use cases
Enterprises can use BuiltWith to gather intel on the existing or potential vulnerabilities of their website based on its infrastructure components. This is particularly useful for attack-surface mapping and software supply chain risk management.
3. DarkSearch.io
DarkSearch is a search engine for collecting dark web intelligence from data dump sites, black hat forums, various document formats, IRC chat rooms, game chats, and more. It works by crawling Tor2web and indexing intel into structured data for faster query responses.
Features and use cases
You can query intel on DarkSearch by using Boolean logic or keyword searches. You can also integrate third-party APIs to export query results for further processing. Additionally, DarkSearch alerts users in real time through designated emails whenever new scans reveal critical intel.
4. FOCA
Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives (FOCA) is a specialized tool for gathering hidden metadata from publicly available documents, including Microsoft and open Docs, SVGs, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint files, and Adobe InDesign files. These documents are typically indexed files downloaded from corporate domains, public websites, and search engines.
Features and use cases
You can run FOCA queries through Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo to uncover intel like compromised usernames, emails, internal IP addresses and paths, and attackers’ TTPs.
5. Intelligence X
Intelligence X is a search engine for monitoring dark web activities and for discovering leaked credentials or exposed sensitive data. It gathers OSINT across multiple platforms, including deep web/dark web forums hosted on Tor, I2P sites, deactivated webpages, and mainstream sources like Facebook, Pastebin, and GitHub. Intelligence X continuously crawls the internet with focus on more obscure sources that are not typically indexed by traditional search engines.
Features and use cases
Intelligence X allows you to query intel from eight different categories. You can use Intelligence X to uncover adversarial activities or mentions directed at your organization, identify documents containing your organization’s sensitive data recovered from dump sites, and more.
6. Maltego
Maltego is a graphical link analysis tool for gathering OSINT on threat actors, organizations, domains, and more. It has a transform-based architecture for conducting automated, customizable queries. Maltego supports data visualization via interactive graphs to enable users to map data relationships (for example, the relationship between an organization and a hacker group).
Features and use cases
Maltego scrapes metadata from social media, identity databases, the dark web, and other OSINT sources, providing real-time, AI-powered monitoring capabilities. With its support for 120+ platforms, you can use Maltego to conduct complex OSINT investigations on specific targets or discover cyber threats and attacks in the wild.
7. Mitaka
Mitaka is an open-source web browser extension for analyzing malware, assessing a URL or email address’s credibility, and generally finding indicators of compromise (IOCs) across IPs, domains, and more. Mitaka gathers intel from a wide range of sources including IP reputation databases, SSL/TLS certificate checker kits, and threat intelligence feeds like MalwareBazaar.
Features and use cases
Once configured, Mitaka automatically runs alongside your browser, scraping threat data such as CVEs, viruses, and malware in target websites via browser extensions.
8. Recon-ng
Recon-ng is a command-line open-source OSINT and pen testing tool. Recon-ng gathers OSINT from databases and IP addresses, DNS lookups, search engines, and more.
Features and use cases
To collect OSINT on organizations, individuals, and more, search Recon-ng’s modules such as ‘bing_domain_web’ for domain information gathering, ‘ip_geolocation’ for collecting data on target’s location, and ‘ssl_search’ for uncovering target’s compromised SSL certificates.
9. SpiderFoot
SpiderFoot is an open-source OSINT tool with 200+ modules for gathering information on target organizations, domains and IP addresses, networks, emails, and usernames. It offers automation capabilities for routine OSINT tasks like DNS queries, threat intelligence checks, breach detection, WHOIS lookups, and more.
Features and use cases
SpiderFoot pulls data from 100+ public sources including social media, websites, threat intelligence feeds, and DNS records. It supports data cross-correlation for mapping the relationships between different entities and provides data visualization tools to graphically map connections between various intel. Enterprises can use intel gathered by SpiderFoot to identify common threat patterns and manage their attack surface.
Enhancing your cybersecurity with solutions powered by Wiz Threat Intelligence (Wiz TI)
Wiz Threat Intelligence (Wiz TI) helps you benefit from OSINT by turning the open-source intelligence you already collect into action. Ingest signals from your preferred OSINT tools then let Wiz enrich them with cloud context, correlate indicators across your environment, and prioritize what matters most for rapid response.
The Cloud Threat Landscape
A comprehensive threat intelligence database of cloud security incidents, actors, tools and techniques.
Explore
Wiz TI continuously identifies indicators of compromise (IoCs); explores tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by threat actors; and discerns threat behaviors in real time. With these insights, organizations are better informed on how to mitigate risks and improve their ability to detect and respond to actual threats. Key features of Wiz TI include:
Wiz Threat Center: This is where the Wiz Threat Research team shares emerging threats, targeted technologies, defenses, and insights detailing how your environment may be impacted.
In-depth investigation: The Wiz Research team conducts extensive research to uncover and investigate new cloud threats, using tools like the Wiz Runtime Sensor. By staying up-to-date about the latest threats as they emerge, you can develop cyberdefense strategies to get ahead of attackers.
CVE Numbering Authority (CNA): In recognition of its efforts in threat and vulnerability research towards a safer and more transparent cloud, Wiz has been authorized as a CNA by the Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE) Program.
TTPs analysis: Wiz investigates various TTPs used by threat actors (for example, TTPs used in EKS attacks) to provide you with insights into the most vulnerable components of your stack and why they’re vulnerable.
These capabilities collectively enhance Wiz's ability to detect, analyze, and respond to cloud security threats. Because Wiz TI’s information is based on research from both open-source and private data, the Wiz platform always has the latest intelligence to protect your stack and ensure its continued resilience, even as new threats, TTPs, and CVEs emerge.
We also have some interesting capabilities coming soon. Stay tuned for:
A portal right in your Wiz platform that incorporates reports from the Cloud Threat Landscape to keep you informed about threat actors and what they’re doing
A feature that helps you correlate findings in your environment and attribute them to specific threat actors.
Get a 1:1 demo of how Wiz shows which threats actually matter
See how Wiz ties threat intelligence to your real cloud environment – highlighting exploitable paths, exposed assets, and risks attackers can reach now.
Related Tool Roundups