By: Nausheen Siddiqui and Kriti Mishra

As the world becomes more agile, fast-paced, and data-oriented, organizations are faced with the issue of making their security processes more coherent. With an internet penetration rate of about 63% worldwide today, the world is expected to produce around 463 exabytes of data by 2025.^[1] Hence the entry of numerous technologies in such a freely available data space is creating new threats to all types of businesses and not just information-based ones. A powerful weapon to cope with this emerging vulnerability and make organizational processes and data more secure is OSINT.

What is OSINT and where did it come from?

Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the collection and analysis of public data to extract considerable intelligence in the required area. Today, there are about 5 billion internet users, 6 billion indexed pages on Google, and 1.9 billion websites.^[2] With such an amount of information available on the internet today, it becomes imperative to strategize and build a framework for the data extraction process. The key driver here could be the dissemination of accumulated data. In order to have a focused intelligence from the open sources available to the general public, it is necessary to have a qualitative mapping to the appropriate audience.

This concept of OSINT has a brief history that can be guided back to the days of World War II. With the purpose of cracking enemy codes, a unit named Government Code and Cypher School was set up by the British Government in 1939. Post-war scenes, this unit had to gather in-depth information about their enemy troops and other competitive matters from the publicly available data to monitor the Soviet Union and its allies. This led to the rise of open-source intelligence across the world.

Where is OSINT used currently?

OSINT has proved to be an efficient tool for cybersecurity, fraud detection, law agencies, journalists, investigation centers, etc. Data Security breaches, leaked assets, or open ports can be identified through OSINT to mitigate risks in the system. Another use case is the identification of potential vulnerabilities or upcoming attacks, which helps professionals to align their actions accordingly. Currently, OSINT is utilized by the US military units to track down threats on networking sites and proactively implement the targeted measures for the same.

OSINT is also used to analyze the situations in a public gathering and anticipate any threats against personnel at events. With rising market demands and fluctuating trends worldwide, OSINT is key in sentiment analysis for better marketing and political campaigns. Businesses can utilize OSINT to detect data breaches at an early stage and respond to incidents in real time. It can also be used to build customer trust, protect the brand’s reputation, and analyze public sentiments. Understanding the opinions of the targeted audience and propagating the ideas correspondingly enhances the capacity to accumulate profits.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of OSINT for businesses?

For organizations, one of the major advantages of OSINT is the cost associated with it. OSINT is easy on the budget as it requires minimum financial investments because the information to be assessed is available for free. Also, the data to be gathered is publicly available. Therefore, there are no legal formalities associated with the gathering of data. Another plus point while using open-source data is that the information is regularly updated. OSINT can prove to be an essential weapon when dealing with matters of national security. Also, OSINT can help provide corporate decision-makers with a big-picture view for driving their business goals.

While OSINT has numerous advantages, it also comes with certain limitations. Since open-source information is available in abundance, it becomes difficult to filter out the insights from the noise. Another aspect is that with significant analytics work that must be validated again, OSINT can provide misleading or inaccurate information.

What does the future look like?

The increasing need for the usage of publicly available data to gain insights is fuelling the growth of OSINT. As businesses rely more and more on open source to gain competition and market insights, techniques like OSINT are becoming highly crucial. Moreover, the rising usage of social media and the increased focus on data prevention are all set to boost OSINT. However, to pave an easier path for the adoption of OSINT, it would have to be assisted by automated data gathering, intelligent interpretation of the gathered data, integration of data across open data sources, and sophisticated data filtration. Other than these technical aspects, OSINT will also have to be assisted by increased awareness along with ethical and legal considerations.