Toolbox
OSINT toolbox
Open-source intelligence tools I use to check my own exposure before someone else does.
None of these tools runs here: they are external services, and each card opens the publisher's site. I use them on my own domains first — that is how I found that two of my subdomains appeared in no public registry, and that a page I had published was the only thing revealing them.
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crt.sh (opens an external site in a new tab)
Certificate transparency logs. Reveals the subdomains a certificate authority has signed — including the ones you thought were discreet.
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Shodan (opens an external site in a new tab)
Search engine for machines exposed on the Internet. What it finds about you is already public: better to know it first.
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Have I Been Pwned (opens an external site in a new tab)
Known data breaches, by email address or by domain. The starting point before any password rotation.
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Wayback Machine (opens an external site in a new tab)
Web archives. What a page said before it was corrected can still be read: removing information is not enough to make it disappear.
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Hardenize (opens an external site in a new tab)
TLS, DNS and security-header configuration of a domain, scored item by item. Useful to verify hardening rather than assume it.
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Mozilla Observatory (opens an external site in a new tab)
HTTP security header audit, with the reason for every lost point. A good complement to an in-house check.
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OsirisAI Live (opens an external site in a new tab)
Real-time map combining air and sea traffic, satellites, submarine cables, public CCTV and world incidents. Useful to place an event before looking for the source that reports it.
Why there is no tool of my own here
I had one planned. The idea was to automate what these services do by hand: gather, from public sources, what can be found about a person. Technically, nothing insurmountable. The risk analysis killed it — and not where I expected.
The main risk was legal, not technical. Collecting personal data from somewhere other than the person concerned triggers article 14 of the GDPR: you must inform them of what data, why, on which legal basis and for how long. For strangers found across open sources, that obligation is not hard to meet, it is impossible — and the exemption for disproportionate effort does not cover a tool whose whole purpose is exactly that.
So the project was dropped in that form, then restarted without third-party personal data: the same techniques, turned towards my own exposure. I am the person concerned, article 14 does not apply, and the tool is useful — that is what produced the Observatory and this page.
It is the only project I stopped for a compliance reason rather than a feasibility one, and it is the one I talk about most willingly: knowing how to build something and deciding not to is a skill of its own.
The analysis behind that decision is published — the risk analysis and the GDPR register (in French). EBIOS RM · GDPR
What matters is not knowing these tools, it is turning them on yourself first. A service I expose without knowing it is already in one of them.