You may be familiar with the Google Sheet I’ve maintained and added to over the last five years, and I hope that it has been useful to you if you have made use of it in that time.

But all good things come to an end, except in this case, I decided actually to make it better. For a long time I was considering moving it away from Google Sheets because A) it’s a bit clunky, B) I wasn’t in complete control of the tool and C) I thought there could be a better way.

Enter The OSINT Portal.

I decided that to keep the data controlled, and to enable the community better, a web app would be much better and prettier than what I had previously built. So with that in mind, and a bit of dangerous knowledge, I set out with Lovable and Supabase to do that.

If you’re not familiar, Lovable is a pretty powerful AI website builder, and it works really nicely with Supabase, which as the name suggests, provides the database back end. Inspired by some of the work Dan Card had done recently, I thought that I too could probably vibe code a decent solution and one that has potential to grow and be added to in ways a Google Sheet couldn’t really provide.

So with that in mind, as of this initial release, here are the key features:

• When you run a search in the Dashboard for a selector, where it makes sense, your search query will now autopopulate in the resource URL, saving you time and having to copy/paste from the Google Sheet as per the previous document. This is mostly useful for things like phone numbers and cryptocurrency wallets, but there are other resources that benefit too.

• With training resources, we can now consider embedding videos etc. directly on to the website rather than links.

• With greater control of the site as a whole, future updates may include things like OSINT tradecraft advice and further in-depth style training (TBD at the moment in all honesty)

• It’s also let me note that in just 2 weeks after launching it, over 1000 have already signed up to use the portal, letting me know that there is value in maintaining this resource going forward!

Some people have commented on the fact I put the site behind a need to login, and I understand that. However I’ve done it for what you’ll hopefully agree is a good reason. Previously, we have seen many OSINT tools that are open to use by anyone being abused, with a good example being the web version of What’s My Name going down for a long period back around 12-18 months ago. My hope is that by keeping resources behind a login, it can be both harder to abuse, but also easier to detect if sudden resource requests etc. spike. There’s also the benefit of being able to contact users directly with platform updates and news, which given social media algorithims can be quite hard to inform everyone solely via LinkedIn, X or Bluesky.

So with this initial release of The OSINT Portal, my goal was to replace the original Google Sheet and every resource contained within. I still need to update descriptions of resources in the Dashboard, but with just shy of 800 there at this time, that’s a task that will take a while. I also need to add some of the functionality to indicate sources of potential concern due to geographic base or a dead link. Again, bit of a time sink but I will get there. Likewise, if you come across anything that is dead etc please let me know.

My other favourite feature with this approach is the ease with which the community can now add resources they come across, hopefully making it a real community-driven effort. By adding this functionality within the portal, you can make a submission and after a review I can add it directly to the portal. At the time of writing this, nothing has yet been submitted (boo!!!), come on, if you have a tool, website or a great blog or video on all things OSINT, from cyber to geolocation, please add them!!

So although some things have changed, let’s think about what the future holds! If you have an idea or something you’d love to see on the OSINT Portal, don’t be shy and let me know.

Other Bits

As for what else is going on, I’ve been really busy on getting ThreatLens ready and in a position to be used for an MVP. This attack surface intelligence platform is something that’s the culmination of probably 3 years work in total, with two of those focused on what it will really become. I’m really excited about it, and hopefully when we’re ready to unleash it on the market, everyone else will be too!

If you’re interested in finding out more about ThreatLens, send me a message. The platform is designed to be modular and focused on helping organisations and individuals understand risks to their reputation through data that is publicly available. Human-led and analysed. I think it’s pretty unique and has a lot of potential, but I am biased.

Also, keep an eye out for Kase Scenarios, we’re currently developing some ideas for real-life training workshops with more news to come soon! Again I’m really excited about what we have cooking and can’t wait to get out there and delivering some top notch OSINT training!

I’ve also been pretty busy with a couple of different things, from UK OSINT Community webinars to a podcast appearance talking about cyber threat intelligence and a Maltego Masterclass on using breach data to identify villains based on this blog post. It’s non-stop, but I like it this way. As we start to approach the summer period, I’m hoping to get a bit of time to think about some more useful OSINT content both for this blog and the portal, but still figuring out some of those details.

Until next time. 🍻