Soxoj's homepage

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I am an OSINT specialist with a background in cybersecurity and software development.

Currently, I am a head of the OSINT Center of Excellence in Social Links. My department conduct investigations, teach OSINT and help to develop new methods and professional invesigation tools. For a detailed overview of what my CoE focuses on, read here.

I was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and have lived in Kursk and Moscow, Russia. Now I live in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I first got into open-source intelligence during my student years in 2015, engaging in CTFs and ARGs and developing information-gathering and processing tools. I have experience in anti-bot and anti-fraud protection, penetration testing, programming (primarily in Python, with some Go and Lua), product management, establishing development workflows (Scrum, Kanban), and managing teams.

Since 2018 I’ve been talking about OSINT, search methods, and privacy at public events. I was a speaker at large international conferences: leHACK, Osintomatico, KazHackStan and ISS WORLD Europe / Middle East. Also, I prepared and conducted two training courses about open-source intelligence for cybersec students and private investigators. You can check out some of my talks in this YouTube playlist.

In 2020 I founded the OSINT mindset community (first post, first meetup). The community has more than 40K subscribers, 6K members of Investigation Forum, and dozens of active members and speakers in 4 countries and 6 cities. You can watch records of meetup talks on YouTube, listen to OSINT mindset podcasts on various platforms, and read the excellent wiki on Gitbook.

You can find my articles, guides, and just thoughts on Substack, Medium (old), in Twitter, the Telegram channels Soxoj insides and OSINT mindset (old posts), and, of course, in GitHub list of my guides and collections.

Some my projects 🚧

  • SOWEL - a knowledge base on social media intelligence built on the principles of weaknesses analysis
  • Maigret - a username checker collecting a dossier on a person by username from 3000+ sites (9K stars on GitHub)
  • Adana - a 1-click analytical dashboard for OSINT researchers, Bellingcat hackathon project
  • OSINT namecheckers list - a curated list of all the tools for checking accounts existence by username
  • OSINT CLI tool skeleton - a template of a Python project for new OSINT command-line tools
  • Username generation guide - a definitive guide to generating usernames for OSINT purposes
  • Counter-OSINT & privacy guide [RU] - guide about your personal information protection