Hello from the OJ Team,
We all know the scenario. Your investigation leads to a social media site and you do not have access. You may be able to create an account, but sometimes you cannot. This week, we show you how much information you can access on VK without logging in.
Plus, the latest jobs, tradecraft tips, and news. As usual, all sourced from last week and nothing is older than 7 days.
Let’s get started!
Missed Last Week?
Job Opportunities
FIMI & OSINT Analysts - Junior & Senior , Cronos Europe, Belgium | Read the full listing here
Intelligence Analyst (Arabic), ZeroFox, United Kingdom | Read the full listing here
OSINT Tradecraft Tips & Industry News
Everything you need to know from the past seven days.
Mario Santella shared Archivarix Tube Search on LinkedIn, a tool for recovering metadata, subtitles, and archived files of deleted or unavailalbe YouTube videos using web archives | Read on LinkedIn | Access the tool
THINKPOL, a Paris-based OSINT data provider, released a set of free tools for Reddit investigations | HT Duncan Investigations | Access the tools
Skip Schiphorst shares his start[.]me link collection for resources related to the Middle East | View here
Nico Dekens urges in his DefCon talk to discuss the issue of evidence poisoning more seriously | Read on LinkedIn | Watch his DefCon talk
Aaron Robert from the OSINT Portal shared in a video announcement that an attacker exploited a privilege escalation bug between 6 and 14 August 2026 to upload 18 unauthorised entries to the OSINT Portal’s resources section. The bug has since been fixed and no user data was reportedly accessed or exfiltrated | Watch the announcement here | OSINT Portal
NASA Earthdata is organising a short webinar on August 26, 2026 on how to use Python to stream NASA Earth data without downloading it | Read on LinkedIn | Event Page
The Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) published their guide on how to investigate social media algorithms | Read the guide
Deutsche Welle published an article outlining the details of their AI use in journalism | Read the article
How to access VK without an account
Imagine you come across a lead on a social media platform and you do not have an account yet. You can either create one (if you are allowed to), or you stop and ask for help. There is a third option, which is to access VK without logging in. We show you how to do that, how much is available, and also where the limits are.
