How to Beat Your Fear of Missing Key OSINT Information
Overwhelmed by open-source intelligence? Learn how to build smarter, more focused topics and surface the threats that matter
In corporate security, few things are more unnerving than the thought of missing a critical piece of information — something that could have prevented harm, financial losses, or reputational damage. This anxiety is so common among intelligence professionals that it has a name: Fear of Missing Information (FOMI). It’s the voice in your head asking, “What if I didn’t catch everything?” or “What if I miss something my boss finds later?”
That fear often drives how we approach open-source intelligence (OSINT). Under the pressure of FOMI, the instinct is to collect anything and everything — just in case. But that mindset can be harmful. Instead of gaining clarity, you risk drowning in an endless stream of noise and missing the signals that truly matter. So how do you zero in on what’s truly important?
The answer: building smart, focused topics that surface the most relevant intelligence. Here’s how:
How to Build Better OSINT Topics
1. Start with clear intent
Strong OSINT topic building begins with a clear understanding of what you’re actually looking for. If you’re trying to detect threats before they materialize, focus on grievances and pre-incident indicators, not just obvious threats or violent language.
Frameworks like Pathway to Violence can help you understand how threats tend to escalate and what behavior to proactively look for. Threat actors rarely announce their intentions outright. More often, they drop subtle cues over time rooted in personal or ideological grievances. The right approach can help you surface those cues early.
2. Balance tight and broad topic strategies
A good OSINT strategy balances specificity and scale:
- Tight topics: Use highly specific search phrases tied to names of executives, facility or office locations, or outright threats. These are great for precision but may miss broader context or early-stage grievances.
- Broad topics: Cast a wider net with searches that might surface broad discontent with the industry as a whole or even with your products or services. These will pull in more data, which you can later filter by sentiment, tone, or source type.
Platforms like Ontic help you do both: ingest broadly, then filter deeply to surface what matters.
3. Use trusted keyword repositories
Don’t start from scratch. Use vetted keyword libraries curated by threat intelligence experts. These libraries evolve with emerging language trends, especially in fringe communities where slang and coded terms shift rapidly.
And don’t forget language diversity. For example, if your people or facilities are in areas with large Spanish-speaking populations, build topic variants in Spanish.
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can also help expand or evolve keyword lists. Consider using AI to incorporate keyword variations tailored to specific regions or slang. AI can also help you identify emerging coded language, like the use of “clean house” for a targeted attack.
4. Build smarter Boolean logic
Boolean searches are the foundation of your OSINT queries. It’s important to be deliberate. Avoid overly complex strings, but also make full use of powerful operators. A few must-dos:
- Use proximity operators to ensure relevant terms appear close together (like Near or Adj). This will narrow down your search to the most relevant signals
- Group threat keywords into categories (like “shooting” OR “explosion”).
- Use negations (like NOT or -) to exclude common noise. For example, this could help differentiate media coverage of protests from actual protest threats.
A sloppy Boolean query can generate massive amounts of irrelevant content, lead you to miss something critical, or delay your analysis with too much cleanup.
5. Customize by platform
Different platforms produce different threat signals:
- Mainstream platforms like Facebook or Instagram often surface early-stage grievances or general brand mentions.
- Fringe platforms like Telegram, Reddit, 4chan, and Truth Social can escalate conversations and foster initial planning.
- Dark web forums tend to have lower visibility but the highest likelihood of threat actor planning and coordination.
A one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. Tailor your queries to the source. You might track trending threats on mainstream social media while using more niche, targeted queries in fringe environments. This platform-level precision helps you uncover different layers of signal.
6. Localize your intelligence
Generic brand or executive monitoring is a great start, but it isn’t enough. You need to understand what’s happening around your locations in real time. Build hyper-local topics around:
- Cross-streets and neighborhood nicknames
- Corporate campuses, venues, or event locations
- Executive travel routes and hotel stays
If you’re anticipating major events or executive travel, set up the appropriate location-based monitoring weeks in advance to catch and monitor early threat signals.
7. Track historical signal patterns
Once you’ve built your topics and signals start flowing in, your work isn’t done. You need to understand how signals evolve over time.
Historical signal profiles (like typical tone, sentiment, or author behavior) help you identify patterns. Is a person who regularly posts aggressive language now escalating? Is a protest group’s tone shifting from peaceful to violent?
Tools that support trend analysis and author attribution are vital. They help you prioritize and triage based on historical knowledge, not just isolated incidents.
The value of Connected Intelligence
To get the most value out of OSINT, you need the full picture. Great topic building may surface potential threats early, but context is what allows you to act with confidence.
Some online rhetoric is just that: venting. But you won’t know until you combine OSINT signals with arrest records, license plate readers (LPRs), travel data, or internal information (like from HR), and more to build a complete picture. That’s the power of Connected Intelligence.
Platforms like Ontic make this possible. Ontic lets you build, filter, measure, and act on OSINT signals at scale — all while combining those insights with other critical data, all in one place. In a world where the volume of open-source content is only growing, these tools aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re non-negotiable.
Don’t fear missing information. Fear not having a strategy and system to handle it. With a smart strategy, the right tools, and an iterative mindset, OSINT ca
