Verification and Digital Investigations Resources

Maintained by Craig Silverman of ProPublica (@CraigSilverman). This is by no means a totally comprehensive list, but it covers what I consider to be essential plugins and tools for general OSINT/online research work. There are also links to other resources to go deeper. Feedback? Contact me.

Essential Browser Plugins

• InVID-WeVerify
• WayBack Machine
• Ghostery 
• CrowdTangle

Photo Analysis

• TinEye reverse image search 
• Yandex reverse image search
• EXIF Reader
• FotoForensics
• Karmadecay reverse image search tool for Reddit
• Tool to take an image and convert characters to text
• Free tool that helps remove background images from a photo, to help with reverse image search
• FindClone.ru reverse image/facial recognition
• Sensity tool for detecting GAN generated faces

Video Analysis

• YouTube Data Viewer
• InVID (see above)

Website Analysis

• Whoxy free whois/domain name search
• Whoisology whois-domain search
• DomainTools paid whois search and investigations tool
• ViewDNS is another useful tool for analyzing domain names.
• Internet Archive/Wayback Machine
• The Advanced Search page for the Internet Archive
• Archive.is often used for social media profiles as well
• Spy On Web search for tracking Google Analytics and AdSense
• Publicwww, search to see how many websites have the same source code or snippet of text (looks in HTML, JS and CSS code as well as webpages)
• NerdyData source code search
• AnalyzeID find related websites through ad codes
• DNSlytics is another great tool for connecting websites together via AdSense, Google Analytics, IP etc. Reasonably-priced paid verison, too
• Viewcached.com tool for retrieving cached pages from multiple search engines
• FOCA tool for analyzing metadata in documents on the web (Windows only)
• A tool that tries to guess when a webpage first went online
• Paid tool to monitor changes to specific webpages
• URLScan is a free tool that gives an overview of a site, the tools used to build it, and other useful info

Social Media Search and Account Analysis

• Foller.me Analytics for Twitter 
• Tinfoleak tool for getting a lot of useful overview related to a Twitter account
• Account Analysis is another great Twitter account analysis tool
• MakeAdverbsGreatAgain is another useful Twitter analysis tool
• Twitonomy Twitter tool for analyzing an account, hashtags, etc.
• Followerwonk Twitter tool for searching bios, user analysis etc.
• Twiangulate.com for mapping connections between accounts
• Tool that lists the accounts that retweeted a specific account, with lots of sorting and filtering options
• Facebook profile investigator
• Facebook Graph search interface
• Search for dates and date ranges on Facebook
• WhoPostedWhat tool for doing keyword searches on Facebook
• Webmii social media profile search
• Twitter advanced search
• Gramspy Instagram analysis tool
• Buzzweb Instagram analysis tool
• Tool to analyze whether reviews on amazon/Yelp/TripAdvisor etc. are fake
• SocialBlade tool for analyzing YouTube, Twitter, Insta, Twitch accounts
• Tool to see if a username is used across different online services
• An even more comprehensive tool for searching a username across platforms
• And one more excellent username search tool
• A Snapchat username search tool
• A tool to search for Instagram users by name or username without having to login
• A tool for analyzing a Telegram account/channel

Finding People

• Spokeo people search (good for the US only)
• Thats Them people search
• Pipl people Search 
• Skopenow (an excellent paid tool)
• Name2email browser extension that helps you find a person’s correct email
• Hooyu is a great paid tool for identifying connections between people and entities in the UK

Advertising Analysis

• Moat ad analytics tool
• Facebook political/issue ads database
• Google political ads database
• Pathmatics display and Facebook ads tracking tool (paid)
• Exodus tool to evaluate a mobile app’s permissions and ad trackers

Web Traffic Analysis

• Alexa
• SimilarWeb
• Backlink checker

Corporate/Business Tools

• Opensanctions (“a global database of persons and companies of political, criminal, or economic interest. It combines the most important sanctions lists, databases of politically exposed persons etc.”)
• Open Corporates
• Investigative Dashboard
• ICIJ Offshoreleaks Database
• Corporation Wiki
• Orbis paid corporate search
• List of corporate registrars around the world
• An overview of other companies research tools
• Little Sis database of relationships between people, companies etc.

Guides & Other Resources

• Bellingcat's huge list of digital tools (really good, especially if you need mapping/geolocation tools)
• Osint.tools is a great collection of tools and resources
• The Tow Center’s Guide To Open Source Intelligence
• Sapient Intelligence’s big list of OSINT tools
• OSINTFramework.com guide to a wide variety of tools
• VerificationHandbook.com
• The Verification Handbook for Disinformation and Media Manipulation
• ResearchClinic.net from Paul Myers at BBC News
• First Draft
• First Draft’s free online verification courses
• Website investigation tipsheet
• post_fact's OSINT primer
• Step-by-step guide from Data & Society for how to investigate social media accounts
• Start.me page listing lots of tools related to tracking money laundering
• GUIDE: How to spot fakes and hoaxes online - Africa Check
• 10 tools and tricks for verifying Instagram posts
• Full Fact’s guide to spot bad and misleading information
• How to download social media videos without tools
• How to investigate TikTok like a pro!
• Telegram Fundamentals

Presentations from me

• Investigating The Internet, IJF 2018 (slides)
• Investigating the Internet IJF 2018 (video)
• Investigating Chinese Mobile Apps, GIJN 2019 (slides)
• Investigating Digital Mis/Disinformation, GIJN19 (slides)
• A 2020 GIJN webinar (video) where I showed basic network analysis/snowballing techniques using this investigation as a case study. View my slides here.