osint-investigator

A modern, modular OSINT command-line tool for private-investigation work on macOS / Linux.

Built with Typer + Rich for a fast, pleasant terminal UX, Holehe for email-existence checks, and Playwright for JavaScript-heavy people-finder sites such as cyberbackgroundchecks.com.

⚠️ Ethical and legal use

This tool is for authorised investigative work only. Examples of legitimate use:

• Investigating your own accounts and digital footprint.
• Licensed private-investigator casework with a signed engagement.
• Due-diligence research on a counterparty in a transaction you're a party to.
• Missing-persons work in cooperation with family or law enforcement.
• Defensive security research on assets you own or are authorised to test.

You are personally responsible for complying with:

• The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (US) and equivalents in your country.
• GDPR (EU/UK), CCPA (California), PIPEDA (Canada), and other privacy laws.
• Each target site's Terms of Service.
• Any PI licensing requirements in your jurisdiction.
• Stalking, harassment, and anti-doxxing statutes — these apply even when the data is public.

Do not use this tool to: stalk, harass, dox, blackmail, surveil intimate partners, profile people on the basis of protected characteristics, or investigate anyone you don't have a lawful basis to investigate. If you're unsure whether your use is lawful, talk to a lawyer before running it. Misuse may be a criminal offence.

The author provides this software "as is" and disclaims liability for misuse. See LICENSE.

Features

• email — Run ~120 Holehe probes against an email and print a Rich table or JSON.
• person — Multi-source person lookup against public-records sources. Six back-ends, selectable with repeatable --source:
  • courtlistener (no auth) — federal court records via v4 REST API.
  • edgar (no auth) — SEC EDGAR full-text search for filings mentioning the subject. Officers, directors, insider trades, 13F holdings.
  • opencorporates (key) — officer / director search across global company registries.
  • fec (key) — federal political contributions above $200.
  • ofac_csl (key) — US Treasury / BIS / State Dept consolidated sanctions screening list (OFAC SDN + Entity List + Debarred).
  • cyberbackgroundchecks — Playwright scaffold, currently Cloudflare-blocked; reports blocked honestly rather than silently returning nothing. Defaults to the two no-auth sources (courtlistener + edgar).
• username — Check a handle across ~460 sites (Sherlock catalogue bundled into the wheel). Filtering via --site, --top, --include-nsfw; concurrency capped via --concurrency; full catalogue with --all.
• domain — Investigate a domain across three sections: RDAP (via rdap.org) for registrar/dates/status/nameservers, DNS (A/AAAA/MX/NS/TXT/CAA via dnspython), and subdomain enumeration from Certificate Transparency logs (via crt.sh). Section-selectable with --section.
• breach — Lookup against Have I Been Pwned + DDoSecrets release index.
• password — Check a password against HIBP's PwnedPasswords corpus via k-anonymity. Your password never leaves your machine.
• profile — Aggregator. Pass any subset of --email, --username, --first/--last, --domain and every relevant module runs in parallel, producing one Markdown report (also writeable to a file via --report), one combined JSON document via --json, and/or one JSONL line in a case file via --output.
• --json flag on every command for clean piping into jq, files, or other tooling.
• --output FILE flag on every command to append the JSON result as one JSONL record to a case file — accumulate an entire investigation across multiple invocations into one file jq and grep can read directly.
• Polite scraping by default (configurable delay, identifiable User-Agent).
• Typed throughout, mypy --strict clean, formatted with ruff.

Project layout

osint-investigator/
├── pyproject.toml
├── README.md
├── .env.example
├── src/osint_investigator/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── cli.py              # Typer root app
│   ├── config.py           # pydantic-settings, .env loader
│   ├── utils.py            # shared helpers (console, JSON printer, polite sleep)
│   ├── data/               # bundled package data (Sherlock catalogue snapshot)
│   └── modules/
│       ├── __init__.py
│       ├── email_module.py     # Holehe orchestrator
│       ├── person_module.py    # CourtListener + Playwright (Cloudflare-aware)
│       ├── username_module.py  # Sherlock-backed handle probe
│       ├── sherlock_sites.py   # Sherlock data.json loader + site selection
│       ├── domain_module.py    # RDAP + DNS + crt.sh
│       ├── breach_module.py    # HIBP + DDoSecrets
│       ├── password_module.py  # HIBP PwnedPasswords k-anonymity check
│       └── profile_module.py   # Aggregator → unified Markdown / JSON report
└── tests/                  # pytest suite (offline; fixtures under tests/fixtures/)

Install

# Stable release from PyPI
pip install osint-investigator
playwright install chromium  # only needed if you use the `person` cyberbackgroundchecks source

# Or the latest from main
pip install "git+https://github.com/J4y35/osint-investigator.git"

Then (optional) drop a .env next to your shell with an HIBP API key so the breach command can talk to Have I Been Pwned:

echo 'HIBP_API_KEY=your-key-here' > .env

Development quickstart (macOS / Linux)

# 1. Clone the project
git clone https://github.com/J4y35/osint-investigator.git
cd osint-investigator

# 2. Create and activate a virtualenv
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

# 3. Install in editable mode + Playwright browsers
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -e ".[dev]"
playwright install chromium

# 4. Configure
cp .env.example .env
# then edit .env to add HIBP_API_KEY etc. (all optional)

# 5. Verify
osint-investigator --help
pytest -q

Commands

email

Check ~120 sites with Holehe.

osint-investigator email --email someone@gmail.com
osint-investigator email --email someone@gmail.com --json > result.json
osint-investigator email --email someone@gmail.com --only-found

person

Search people-finder sites. Currently wired to cyberbackgroundchecks.com.

osint-investigator person --first Jane --last Doe --state CA

username

Check whether a handle is registered.

osint-investigator username --username johnsmith

breach

Lookup breach corpora (HIBP requires HIBP_API_KEY in .env).

osint-investigator breach --query someone@gmail.com

Configuration

All configuration lives in .env. See .env.example for the full set.

Extending

Each subcommand is a self-contained module under src/osint_investigator/modules/. To add a new command:

1. Create modules/<name>_module.py exposing a Typer instance named app.
2. Register it in cli.py with app.add_typer(...).
3. Re-install (pip install -e .) to pick up the entry point — or just rerun.

For people-finder scrapers, mimic _scrape_cyberbackgroundchecks in person_module.py and register the new coroutine in the SCRAPERS dict.

Development

ruff check src tests
ruff format src tests
mypy src
pytest

License

MIT. See pyproject.toml for author info.