OSINT for Geopolitical Crisis Response: Investigating a Rumored Presidential Assassination

It’s 7pm, I’m on a train in Venice, and suddenly the phone rings – it’s my boss. ‘A client of ours operates in Equatorial Guinea. They’ve just heard that the president has been assassinated and that Russian-backed mercenaries are attempting to overthrow the state. They need to know if there’s any truth to this before they repatriate all of their staff. Given the situation, this needs to be done as quickly as possible.' 'No pressure or anything.' This presentation will cover and outline the exact methods and steps used in an OSINT-powered investigation to uncover the truth behind the bold claim received by our client – highlighting both best practice and the value of timeliness in a high-pressure case study. Attendees can expect to learn: The contextualized value of timeliness in OSINT investigations – particularly centering around geopolitical risk and crisis response. The ‘logic’ and workflow behind an OSINT investigation revolving around time-sensitive crisis management: How the task was broken down into steps, and why those steps were chosen. Useful OSINT techniques: searching for online posts by blast radius, searching in multiple languages of note. In practice, this involved identifying the languages of concern for this investigation Spanish, French, Portuguese, English, Russian) and conducting distance-based searches via Twitter, Facebook and YouTube (alongside simple location-based searches on other platforms). Methodology: How to individually assess both the claim (in this case, a Presidential assassination and imminent coup) and the source. The core actionable takeaways are: Understanding how claim-based investigations can (and should) be broken down into investigations of the claim and investigations of the source. Understanding the importance of identifying key tasks first when fighting tight time constraints. Understanding how the report to the client was framed - particularly in highlighting confidence in the intelligence found. Techniques for leveraging OSINT searches on social media for expedited results (in this case, ‘blast radius’ searches over a capital city, multilingual searches for further evidence).