This Year in OSINT

Last week, we were fortunate enough to welcome a group of OSINT enthusiasts and experts from all sectors to our This Year in OSINT event. Our CEO Stuart Clarke and Head of Intelligence Brett Redman discussed the trends we saw amongst our customers and community in 2024 – and how we see these developing in 2025. This article summarises the key topics covered.

The growth of OSINT in 2024

From conflicts to cybersecurity

2024 was marked by conflicts all over the globe, power shifts in the Middle East, and contested elections in various countries. In these scenarios, OSINT played a critical role, in turn boosting awareness of its value amongst the public. While key events are too numerous to list, we singled out three categories where OSINT’s impact was most evident:

• Developing conflicts During conflicts, OSINT provided real-time situational awareness. For instance, satellite imagery and social media reports offered ground-level insights, allowing analysts to verify troop movements and humanitarian conditions.

• Contested elections OSINT helped identify and counter misinformation campaigns. Analysts used social media monitoring to trace the origins of false narratives and inform the public with fact-based countermeasures.

• Cybersecurity events: 2024 was also a year of heightened cybersecurity concerns, with several high-profile cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure and financial institutions. OSINT was instrumental in identifying threat actors and understanding their tactics. Analysts used dark web monitoring and breached data repositories to track cybercriminal activities. The proactive use of OSINT helped in early detection of potential threats, enabling proactive measures to protect sensitive information. OSINT analysts have also been at the forefront of tracking ransomware groups, understanding their operations, and providing intelligence to help organisations recover from attacks.

Trends in OSINT Regulation and impact on the community

Amidst this increasingly complex global climate, 2024 saw the beginning of a regulatory shift in OSINT. The US National Strategy for Open-Source Intelligence released late in the year outlined a comprehensive framework for integrating OSINT into national security and law enforcement efforts. This strategy emphasised the need for cross-agency collaboration, ethical guidelines, and the development of standardised practices for OSINT operations.

At the same time, we saw an increase in initiatives aimed at enhancing OSINT capabilities within federal agencies. This might include increased funding for technology acquisition and training programs to ensure that OSINT analysts are equipped with the latest tools and methodologies.

Perhaps as a result of increasing public recognition of OSINT, we observed a real growth in OSINT community and best-practice sharing. From growing interest in small networks such as ODIN, to healthy discussion on social media, to more public-private partnerships – OSINT professionals are working together more. We hope that these efforts to partner to enhance threat intelligence and response capabilities will continue in 2025.

What’s next? 2025: The year of modernisation and intelligence convergence

A UK OSINT Policy?

The US National OSINT strategy paves the way for further regulation in the UK and Europe. Modernisation of the UK’s approach to OSINT is long overdue. Government policy needs to reflect OSINT’s growing importance and the changing global landscape, and we expect to see developments along these lines in 2025.

Increased emphasis on data privacy regulations will be needed to support a focus on OSINT strategy and ensure that OSINT practices comply with evolving legal standards. OSINT cannot be part of national strategy without more regulation around what the term OSINT means, what is proportional and how to protect individual rights. For this reason, ethical use and best practices that focus on balancing privacy with investigative insight will be key.

We believe that the OSINT community will have a vital role to play in the establishment of clearer standards for ethical OSINT.  Policymakers would do well to draw on existing expertise to inform data privacy and ethical regulations.

Convergence of intelligence disciplines

As OSINT becomes more engrained in national strategy, so will the need to combine intelligence from open and closed sources, such as privileged and internal data.

This trend is already apparent within our customer community and, in response, we have lowered the technical barriers to adding data. Those wishing to combine internal or privileged data with OSINT can use the Videris Extension Builder. The Extension Builder facilitates low-code integration of any data source with an API, ultimately allowing access all of the data an organisation needs in a single, secure interface.

Whilst we can’t ignore the importance data security, this data-agnostic approach has huge potential for impact in the OSINT community, taking it from a siloed, ‘niche’ intelligence form to a cornerstone of investigative prowess.

Impact of AI

Artificial Intelligence saw huge surges in popularity in 2024 – but in 2025 we’ll begin to really understand its impact.

In an OSINT context, there are many opportunities for AI. Amongst these are major efficiency gains: AI can support more automated workflows and summarise data. Better investigation outcomes are also possible, as AI may be able to improve the quality of analytical insights.

However, with opportunity comes significant risk. In an investigative context, AI should not yet be making decisions alone: we need human and machine collaboration to ensure accurate, ethical results. Promised efficiency gains may make data collection easier, but they present concerns around ethical collection. Just like investigators, criminals can capitalise on AI, for example by creating synthetic identities or spreading misinformation.

Economic crime: stop the money, stop the crime

In our work across government, law enforcement, banks and other private sector companies,  economic crime is now discussed more than any other use case. Currently, investigators are focusing on fighting a huge range of crimes – from trafficking, to fraud, to corruption. Economic crime lies at the root of many of these: organised crime networks are committing crimes for money and blocking this flow of funds is often the only way of disrupting such crimes.

OSINT is uniquely positioned to support this cause. Economic crime operates in layers of networks, across which criminals move money. The types of data we need to understand these networks – corporate registries, social media, adverse news – are largely open source, and can easily be overlaid with commercially available datasets. Capturing this opportunity is essential: if criminals are using every resource at their disposal, so must investigators.

OSINT and its impact in 2025

In our role as a leading provider of OSINT software, we have the privilege of speaking with a wide range of OSINT practitioners, investigations experts and their organisations on a regular basis. This gives us unique insight into the challenges and opportunities the OSINT industry experiences year-on-year. While 2025 will undoubtedly bring its share of difficulties, OSINT investigators have huge opportunity to make a real impact. We hope that, by sharing these insights, we can help you to equip your team to deal with these challenges and embrace opportunities to use OSINT for societal good.