Jim McKee

🔍 Some of the most creative breakthroughs in OSINT come from experimental R&D and this upcoming edition of the The OSINT Newsletter by Jake Creps is packed with exactly that. From biometric tattoo recognition (via Aidan Raney) to AI agents that can instantly profile companies, the research covered here has real investigative applications. Add in ethical Gmail validation insights from 🔐Yoni ‍ and a clever phishing trick breakdown by Michel Coene, and you’ve got a playbook of techniques every investigator should know. Subscribe FREE to get notified when it is sent out 👇

21

The future of fraud prevention is not detection. It’s #prediction! And prediction only becomes possible when intelligence is shared. Investment, romance, and marketplace scams consistently reuse the same recipient accounts across many victims. Viewed in isolation, each institution sees a single transaction and responds reactively. Viewed collectively, those shared signals expose active scam infrastructure early, making it possible to predict that additional victims are already engaged and that more payment attempts are imminent. The same holds for money mule networks: what appears as weak or ambiguous activity in one bank becomes a reliable predictor of future fraud when correlated across several institutions. Fraud operates as a coordinated system, and effective defense must do the same. The organizations that will lead in fraud prevention are those that shift from retrospective detection to anticipatory action, using shared intelligence not just to stop today’s loss, but to predict and prevent tomorrow’s.

127

1 Comment

PCI DSS has a fundamental design flaw. Enforcement is outsourced to acquiring banks, who have every commercial reason not to irritate their merchant customers. They don’t want to build or fund large teams of PCI specialists capable of accurately assessing the compliance of millions of merchants, so they push the burden downstream. Merchants are told to self‑assess, which means the people least equipped to understand PCI DSS end up determining their own compliance status. The results are predictable. The downstream ecosystem has repeatedly shown it cannot be trusted to secure cardholder data. If an ecosystem consistently fails to meet the minimum bar, the logical conclusion is that it shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near sensitive payment data in the first place. What makes this even more absurd is that banks absolutely could design a tamper‑proof, foolproof, merchant‑proof payment system. The technology exists. The cryptography exists. The outsourcing options exist. What doesn’t exist is the incentive. The current model is profitable and low‑liability. Fraud losses, compliance costs, breach penalties and operational burdens are all pushed onto merchants. A truly secure system would flip that responsibility back onto the banks and card brands, but they have no interest in owning that liability. On top of that, a foolproof system would wipe out the entire PCI compliance industry, which has become a revenue stream in its own right. So we’re left with a system built on 1970s architecture, protected by a standard that relies on self‑attestation, enforced by organisations with no incentive to enforce it, and surrounded by an ecosystem that has proven it cannot secure the data it handles. If the industry genuinely wants secure payments, it needs to stop pretending PCI DSS is a security standard and start treating it for what it is: a liability‑shifting mechanism. Real security will only arrive when the organisations with the power to fix the system are also the ones who bear the consequences when it fails. #payments #security #pcidss #compliance #fintech #cybersecurity #riskmanagement #dataprotection #infosec #governance #standards #paymentsindustry #merchantservices #regulation #technology

21

15 Comments

Strong conversations coming out of Milipol Paris 2025 🇫🇷 Megadose Palenath met with the Ministère de l'Intérieur of the Préfecture de Police who use OSINT Industries in their daily investigative work. These exchanges underline something we are seeing across Europe and beyond. Open source intelligence is no longer a specialist capability. It is becoming core infrastructure for modern law enforcement and security operations. The feedback from teams like the BRI is invaluable and helps shape the direction of our platform. Great work Megadose Palenath! 🤝 #OSINT #Intelligence

8

“Probably the best OSINT capability in the world." Now embedded in Altia OSINT Investigator across Canada via the OSINT Industries API - faster intelligence, deeper digital footprint analysis, less manual work. I’m in Canada this week. Recognise the slogan? Use your OSINT skills… guess the brand and I’ll give you a free pilot.”** altia US | Canada

7

What if the regulations you thought were holding back facial authentication were actually the key to making it work? That’s the insight behind our new white paper, written in collaboration with The Access Control Collective and RealSense: 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙀𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝘼𝙥𝙥𝙡𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙛 𝙁𝙖𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝘼𝙪𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙞𝙣 𝙀𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙥𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙚 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝘾𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙧𝙤𝙡 𝙞𝙣 𝙒𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙣 𝙈𝙖𝙧𝙠𝙚𝙩𝙨. Thank you to Mike Nielsen, Eyal Rond, Penny Malsch and the team at RealSense for the opportunity to collaborate on such an important piece. 𝗔𝘃𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘄. Download in the comments. 👇

21

1 Comment

The data associated with Flock Safety deployments, year over year, is impossible to ignore. Here's yet another example of that! Excerpt from the story on SDPD: Inside the category, the number of motor vehicle theft incidents had the biggest drop, falling about 20% — from 6,723 in 2023 to 5,409 in 2024. Police officials attribute this change to the use of automated license plate reader technology...

15