Top Browser Extensions for OSINT
The main aim of writing this blog is to help beginners is setting up their browser for OSINT investigation and to simplify the process.
Before deep diving into the top 10 extension, let’s get familiar with what are browser extensions, how to install them, and why do we need these for OSINT.
What are Browser Extension?
These are the programs that can be installed on a browser that can modify your experience or add functionality to the browser. These are created with the help of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.
How to install these extension in your browser?
Extension are generally made for a specific browser. Like if a browser has been made for google chrome, it may or may not support working in other browser. So, it suggested that you should try installing the extension in the browser for which it was made.
Most of the extensions support google chrome, so it is suggested to use that in tasks where you think that you will needing a extension to make your work simple or you can switch to chrome when you need to use that particular extension.
The process of installation is really simple and is as following for Google Chrome -
- Open Chrome web store website using the given link
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions
Or
If you know the name/ link of the Chrome extension, proceed to 3 directly. - Find the extension which you want to install using the search box or manually.
- Click on “Add to Chrome”, once the popup shows click on “Add extension” and the download will start automatically in a few seconds.
- Click on the extension icon in the top right corner above Google account profile icon and check if the download successfully
Note — The process is similar for all other browsers, also you can google for step by step tutorial.
Video Tutorial
Video on How to install extensions in chrome
Top 15 Chrome Extensions -
- Vortimo OSINT-tool -
A OSINT Swiss army knife:bookmark/record pages, store screenshots, scrape and enrich entities. Finds text on every page + highlight.
Features -
=> Keeps track of every site you visit:
→ Saves URL + screenshot of every page you visit.
→ Allows you to capture any part of the screen and save it and find it later.
→ You can bookmark sites for easy retrieval later.
→ You can search for pages you’ve been to using title / URL or bookmark.
=> Generically extracts objects from pages
-> Names, email addresses, phone, hashtag, alias, GPS coordinates, IP address and others.
→ Filter on type, value of object, see where it occurred in pages you’ve been to.
→ Can copy list of objects to clipboard to easily paste into reports/databases/other tools.
→ Allows you to search for any of the extracted objects.
=> Enrich objects / images / pages
→ Using a list of OSINT tools you can enrich any of the objects extracted (like Dehashed, Epieos, Domaintools etc. etc).
→ In the page itself, no need to switch to other tool.
→ Reverse image search on images using Yandex/Google/Bing/TinEye.
→ Exif on images using Vortimo’s own online Exif viewer (yay).
→ Find old instance of the pages you’re on using WayBack machine and other tools.
→ Find pages that use same tracking codes using BuiltWith and other tools.
and many more features, try the extension and you will get to know. - Hunchly 2.0 -
It helps in capturing and organizing online data for your investigations.
Features -
→ Auto captures all the pages you visit and makes them organized.
→ Control what you wanted to save and what’not
→ Create offline copies if the page gets down - Selection Search -
It provides you the feasibility to search on multiple search engines for the selected text from the page itself. - Gotanda -
It can be used for searching OSINT information from some IoC(IP, domain, url, asn, socials, hash, etc) in web page. - Map Switcher -
It helps in switching between different map services with exact same coordinates on another map. - Fake news debunker by InVID & WeVerify -
It is “Swiss army knife” helping journalists, fact-checkers, and human rights defenders to save time and be more efficient in their fact-checking and debunking tasks on social networks especially when verifying videos and images.
→ Quickly get conceptual information on images and videos on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter
→ to perform reverse image search on Google, Bing, Tineye, Baidu, and many more
→ to query the database of new fakes
→ to fragment videos from various platforms into fragment for more effective observation
→ read and see the image and video metadata
→ check for video copyrights
→ quickly check for fact checks and cross network queries
and many more. - Search by Image -
A powerful reverse image search tool, with support for various search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu and Tineye.
Features -
→ search an image from the page or search the image url
→ search with a captured area on the page
→ search with a image from your device
→ select an image on the page and search with the image file. - Distill -
It allows you to passively monitor webpages and social pages for changes.
Features -
→ inbox style watchlist for manage monitors
→ easy content selection from any page
→ highlighted changes
→ change history
→ Get alerts via email, SMS, push notification on phone, slack and discord webhook and many more
→ condition for smart actions - Nimbus Screenshot & Screen Video Recorder -
A extension for taking screenshots and video recording of web pages.
Features -
→ Screen capture whole or partial screenshots on any size of screen
→ Annotate and edit screenshots and screen cast in a powerful image editor and screenshot tool
→ record video screen from your screen and webcam using the video recorder.
→ Trim and Crop screencasts
→ Quickly Upload and Share online screenshots and screencasts using the capture tool. - Instant Data Scraper -
It extracts data from web pages and exports it as Excel or CSV files
Features -
→ Detecting data for extraction with AI
→ Delay and maximum wait time customization for desired crawling speed
→ Support for pagination on websites
→ Automatic navigation to next page via buttons or links
→ Support for infinite scrolling
→ Extracted data preview with copy and paste support
→ Data export to Excel spreadsheet or CSV file - Hunter -
Find email addresses from anywhere on the web, with just one click.
Features -
→ automatic email search on domain of your page
→ Email search via contact name
→ gives you confidence score for all shown emails - OSIRIS -
A tool for analyzing IoC’s reputation.
Features -
→ Supports input as a list of IPs
→ option to choose for selected search
→supports searching via IP, hash, UR - Sputnik -
Another IoC analyzing tool which supports searching via IP, domain, hash, URL. - IP Address and Domain Information -
It displays detailed information about the current website.
Features -
→ See IP info like IPv4, IPv6, DNS, whois data, and many more
→ See domain info like Alexa ranking, social media activity, and many more
→ See provider info like BGP, IPv4 subnets, IPv6 subnets, hosted nameservers and many more. - Vytal -
Spoof time zone, geolocation, locale and user agent. - FOCA Files Finder -
It scans for available files for a website and provide with the download link for analyzing locally. - Web Archives -
It allows you to view archived and cached versions of web pages on 10+ search engines, such as the Wayback Machine, Archive.is and Google.
That’s it for this blog, if you guys want next part of this, let me know by clapping and leaving a response.
Explore our github for a full list of amazing extensions for OSINT.
https://github.com/osintambition/Awesome-Browser-Extensions-for-OSINT
That’s it for today. Tomorrow, we will be learning about an amazing extension for maintaining privacy and security while doing OSINT investigations.
If i missed something, let me know, so we can cover that topic or point in upcoming blogs.
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