OSINT Weekly Review 2025.40. 🔍 Incredible finds from weekly…

🔍 Incredible finds from weekly newsletters from around the community.

Many of us subscribe to numerous newsletters, but we rarely have the time to read everything in them. So today, I’m taking a moment to highlight a few gems from this past week’s stellar reads.

🛡️ Kicking off Cybersecurity Month, the SANS Institute included in their weekly email links to “A Cyber Awareness Kit for Every Generation.” If you’ve got kids or parents you want to protect, this toolkit is for you. Sign up for free SANS emails.

Bonus: From the SANS OUCH! Newsletter, “The Hidden Dangers of Forgotten Accounts: Why It Pays to Clean House,” focuses on clearing up old online accounts that could compromise your digital security. Read it here or listen to the podcast. You can sign up for the OUCH! Newsletter newsletter with your free SANS account, if you haven’t already.

🔍 In partnership with the International Spy Museum, cybersecurity expert and former FBI agent Eric O’Neill will talk about his upcoming book, “Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime,” at an event on 7 Oct at 6:30 ET (virtual, in-person). If you’re not already subscribed to Eric’s newsletter, now is the time to get on board. Always a fantastic read. Eric is constantly sharing tips and stories that keep you engaged.

Learn more about the event at the Spy Museum:

🔮 From Inc.’s This Morning email, a review of AI chatbots, who can see your chat history, and where your data goes. If you haven’t changed your privacy settings yet, now is the time to review what is happening with your searches and make the necessary adjustments.

🇮🇷 From Project Brazen’s Whale Hunting, “Inside Iran’s Shadow Banking Empire: Three Brothers, Hundreds of Tankers, and Billions in Laundered Oil Cash.” Another fascinating investigation into how three brothers have “built one of the most sophisticated sanctions-evasion machines of the modern era.”

If you routinely look at corporate malfeasance, fraud, AML, etc., Whale Hunting should be one of your must-reads. Subscribe here.

Bonus: Another great investigation from Whale Hunting that dropped this week was “Sam Altman’s Worldcoin partnered with $1.5 billion criminal network in Thailand.” This investigation found that “Sam Altman’s controversial AI company, Tools for Humanity, unwittingly became entangled with a criminal “dirty money” network tied to Chinese scam centers in Cambodia.” Definitely worth a read.

🇪🇸 🇷🇺 From The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a look at a wine exporter who is “under investigation for shipping sanctioned chemicals to Russia,” including a chemical involved in the manufacturing of nerve agent VX. Read more to find out what else investigators discovered about this person of interest. Subscribe to the OCCRP weekly newsletter at the bottom of their homepage.

🔍 Lastly, from Indicator Media, their latest guide looks at AI Media and how and when platforms label AI content. The guide includes a table that summarizes platform labeling actions. “Platform-specific sections below the table provide additional context on labeling architecture, relevant policies, and screenshots of the label implementation.”