Learn OSINT — a curated starting point for open source intelligence: free guides, hands-on labs, structured courses, and tools to run real investigations.

Some links on this page are affiliate links: if you sign up through them I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. I only list resources I think are genuinely worth your time.

• OSINT Framework — interactive mind-map of every major OSINT technique and tool category. The best first stop.
• Bellingcat guides & toolkit — step-by-step investigation walkthroughs from the team behind some of the biggest open-source investigations.
• Trace Labs — OSINT CTF platform focused on finding missing persons. Real cases, real stakes.

• TryHackMe — browser-based labs and learning paths; the OSINT rooms are beginner-friendly and guided.
• Hack The Box — harder, more realistic challenges; good for levelling up after TryHackMe basics.
• HackerDNA — scenario-based OSINT training with structured skill tracks.

• TCM Security — OSINT Fundamentals — thorough beginner-to-intermediate course covering methodology, tooling, and report writing.
• Udemy OSINT courses — search “OSINT” for a range of community-taught courses; often heavily discounted.

• OpenOSINT — open-source AI OSINT agent with 16 tools, MCP server, and interactive REPL. Self-hostable, MIT-licensed.
• OpenOSINT Cloud — hosted REST and MCP API for IP and domain intelligence. No infra to manage.
• Scraping blocked pages & handling CAPTCHAs: when investigation targets protect their pages with Cloudflare or bot-detection, OpenOSINT’s scrape_url tool routes requests through Bright Data Web Unlocker — a commercial proxy layer that bypasses bot-protection and returns clean Markdown. Requires a BRIGHTDATA_API_KEY. Affiliate link.