Indicator Media

Indicator is an independent publication dedicated to exposing digital deception and equipping professionals with the knowledge, tools, and skills to investigate it. We serve people on the front lines of OSINT and digital investigative work.

Buried Signals

Buried Signals is an investigative media and technology company. We build open-source investigation tools, prove them through original reporting, and share them so any journalist can hold power accountable.

How we built this

The tool database is compiled from 17 independent OSINT toolkits maintained by established practitioners and organisations. A weekly crawler checks all sources, adds new tools, and flags deprecated ones. Each tool is enriched with structured documentation.

Recommendations are generated by a language model that can only reference tools in our database — it cannot invent tools or fabricate URLs. The model is guided by few-shot examples drawn from a community survey of OSINT researchers.

Search uses vector embeddings to match queries by meaning rather than keywords. Frequently asked questions are served from a curated cache of editorially reviewed answers with verified tool references.

We run a weekly automated evaluation comparing recommendations against community-validated ground truth to detect quality regressions. The full tool database is published as an open dataset on HuggingFace.