In Plain Sight
A beginner's guide to the ships that aren't supposed to exist — and the open-source tools that can find them anyway.
Francois Beyers — OSINT Investigator
Open-source intelligence investigations, digital forensics, and maritime research.
Latest posts
Hacktoria — Maritime OSINT CTF
A nine-challenge maritime OSINT CTF from Hacktoria covering vessel tracking, port identification, ship ownership, piracy investigation, maritime communications, incident analysis, infrastructure geolocation, container tracking, and naval activities.
Your Digital Footprint is Bigger Than You Think
A casual five-minute OSINT audit reveals more about the average person than most would be comfortable knowing. Here is what you are leaving in the open.
OSINT Industries — Depix
Recovering passenger details from a heavily pixelated flight ticket using barcode decoding, image overlay techniques, and boarding pass standards research.
OSINT UK — Operation Illuminate
A multi-stage geolocation challenge from OSINT UK set along the Spanish coast — tracing a hiking trail from Albir to its lighthouse through reverse image searches, Google Earth, and source code analysis.
Nobody Tells You About the Rabbit Holes
OSINT investigations are mostly wrong turns. The skill is not finding the answer — it is knowing when to abandon your current theory.
OSINT Industries — Find the Masked Man
A Paris geolocation challenge from OSINT Industries — identifying the nearest metro station to a masked individual using visual clues, contextual filtering, and Overpass Turbo.
OSINT UK — The Disappearance of Owain Hughes
A multi-stage missing person investigation CTF from OSINT UK, covering geolocation, audio forensics, book ciphers, social media tracking, and more.
The Pattern on the Screen
Pattern recognition is the thread that connects financial crime investigation and OSINT. The skill transfers. The instinct is the same.
From Kelp Forests to Kill Chains
How a non-linear path through marine conservation, ocean farming, crowdfunding, and financial crime investigation became the foundation for a career in OSINT and cybersecurity.
Bellingcat Challenge — Up The Creek
Identifying a river from an aerial photograph using targeted reverse image search and Google Earth verification. My first Bellingcat OSINT challenge.