OSINT awareness

providing the knowledge to understand open source intelligence

Jochem van Rens, Rico Muijtjens,

Vincent Muijtjens, Rik Peeters, Jesse
Oosterwijk
 Jochem van Rens, Rico Muijtjens, Vincent Muijtjens, Rik Peeters, Jesse Oosterwijk

OSINT awareness
providing the knowledge to understand open source intelligence

With the increase of popularity of social-media platforms like Facebook and twitter a serious problem has
arisen for their users. A lot of their information is being put forth out in the wild for other people to see.
Of course this is the primary use case for these platforms the downsides is that people who want to be able
to use that information to satisfy their own needs also have access to this information. The police in the
Netherlands has already been warning people not to post when they leave their house on social media in
fear of burglars using this information to strike.

Not only people with bad intention use open source information to create a conclusion. There are also
organizations that use this information to prevent or prosecute crime. Think for example about each
governments defense or police. Bellingcat is a known player in using OSINT to investigate cases.
Bellingcat used OSINT to solve the perpetrators behind the MH17 disaster. Another use case for this is by
companies, many companies will screen their applicants before they invite them to an interview.

The information out on the internet is often way too much to be able to digest properly. It often leads to
trying to find a needle in a haystack. This makes it so that tools are almost universally used to filter out the
gems. Without using these semi-automated processes the process of gathering information and compiling
them into a fitting narrative or conclusion would often take way too long. By using and creating these
tools and being creative in using the internet to gather information one can analyze and draw conclusions
on a lot of different questions.

Most people don’t know the dangers and benefits of that

OSINT brings and as such will need to be educated on
the matter. To create an interactive and fun
environment to learn about the subject Fontys has set
up a project dealing with creating a platform for this
matter. This platform is using a capture the flag method
to create challenges that allow participants to solve
these for points.

Each challenge will have a unique scenario that the user

will need to use open source information to lead to a
conclusion. The challenges have multiple levels of
difficulty to cater to different needs of users so each user
can keep being engaged into solving the challenges and
OSINT use-cases learning more about different use-cases and different
methods of analyzing and fetching data.

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