Over the past decade, the internet has become a place where almost anyone can investigate virtually anything. With the right mix of patience and curiosity, everyday sleuths are piecing together information in ways that rival professional investigators. Entire scandals have been unraveled not by journalists or law enforcement but by people on TikTok, Reddit, or Twitter who simply refuse to let a question go unanswered.
This phenomenon has almost become ubiquitous. A blurry photo of a celebrity can be geolocated within hours using street signs, landmarks, and satellite imagery. A brand’s carefully crafted marketing campaign can collapse when someone compares their products to identical listings on a wholesale site. Flight-tracking data, social media posts, and even background noises in videos have been used to expose inconsistencies or hidden truths.
What’s striking is that most of these investigators aren’t trained analysts, and they aren’t using specialized tools. They’re regular internet users who are good at following digital breadcrumbs. Their main resources are persistence, creativity, and an almost obsessive willingness to keep clicking, cross-referencing, and asking questions until the full picture emerges.
This is, at its core, open source intelligence (OSINT), the practice of collecting and analyzing information that’s publicly available. Traditionally, OSINT had been associated with intelligence agencies, journalists, or cybersecurity professionals. But now, it’s a practice anyone with an internet connection can engage in. And in many cases, the quality of the work being done by hobbyist sleuths matches or even surpasses what we’d expect from professionals.
In the sections that follow, we’ll look at specific examples of this trend, including TikTokers outing fashion brands for false sustainability claims, online communities tracking down a live-streamed flag in the middle of nowhere, and more. These stories highlight the same underlying truth: excellent OSINT doesn’t always require technical expertise or advanced tools. More often, it comes down to persistence, motivation, and a hacker mindset.
One of the clearest examples of everyday sleuthing comes from the fashion world. On TikTok, an account called sustainablefashionfriend began questioning the authenticity of the brand Parke. Parke had built its identity on claims of sustainability and transparency, values that strongly appeal to younger, environmentally conscious buyers. But something about their product line didn’t quite add up.
Instead of taking the company’s branding at face value, sustainablefashionfriend started digging. By searching wholesale sites like Alibaba and comparing product photos, they discovered that Parke’s supposedly “sustainable” clothing items were identical to mass-produced garments sold in bulk. Parke wasn’t producing unique, eco-friendly fashion pieces; they were ordering cheaply manufactured stock and rebranding it as sustainable.
This revelation spread quickly across social media. Within days, Parke’s credibility had tanked. TikTokers amplified the findings, memes circulated, and the brand’s reputation for authenticity—something it had worked hard to market—evaporated almost overnight.
The interesting part is how simple the investigation really was. It didn’t involve hacking into Parke’s systems, breaching a database, or accessing any hidden information. The entire exposé came from information already available online, often posted directly on their own social media accounts. It was simply discovered by someone who was motivated, detail-oriented, and willing to spend the time cross-referencing.
This case is a textbook demonstration of how OSINT works in practice. When professionals in cybersecurity talk about OSINT, they’re often referring to mapping an organization’s digital footprint, identifying exposed assets, or uncovering data leaks. The method here is essentially the same. It’s about noticing when something looks inconsistent, finding the right sources to check, and piecing together a story that the subject probably didn’t want revealed.
The Parke story is just one example in a much broader cultural trend. What’s often described as “cancel culture” is, in practice, a decentralized OSINT machine. People notice inconsistencies, follow the digital breadcrumbs, and then publish their findings to an audience that’s eager to react. It doesn’t always follow the structure of a formal investigation, but the process is remarkably similar.
Consider the way internet communities have tracked the movements of celebrities through publicly available flight data. Taylor Swift’s private jet usage became a viral topic when hobbyists cross-referenced flight records to calculate her carbon emissions, which clashed with her public image of environmental awareness. A similar story played out with Elon Musk’s private jet, where a college student created a Twitter bot to automatically post flight updates using open FAA data. Neither Swift nor Musk were hacked; the information was already out there for anyone who knew where to look.
Other examples are less technical but equally effective. Influencers like James Charles have faced waves of scrutiny when old screenshots, DMs, and videos resurfaced, often stitched together by online communities to show patterns of behavior that contradict their carefully managed brand. The infamous Fyre Festival fiasco also unraveled under the watch of internet sleuths, who pointed out inconsistencies between the glossy influencer-driven marketing and the logistical reality long before attendees arrived to find cheese sandwiches in Styrofoam boxes.
What ties these cases together is the way thousands of ordinary people, often acting independently, can pool their skills, instincts, and attention spans to expose contradictions. Cancel culture has its downsides, of course. Investigations can be sloppy, biased, or unfair, but it has shown just how powerful open-source investigation can be when distributed across a motivated online crowd.
For cybersecurity professionals, this should feel familiar. It’s essentially crowdsourced reconnaissance. Just as hackers in a bug bounty program uncover issues by testing assumptions and following leads, online communities do the same with public figures and brands. The stakes are different, but the mechanics are nearly identical.
Some of the most striking examples of online sleuthing come from situations where people went far beyond casual digging. These cases exemplify the sheer determination and creativity that motivated communities can bring when they decide to solve a puzzle.
One of the most famous is the saga of Shia LaBeouf’s “He Will Not Divide Us” flag. After the actor set up a live-streamed protest installation, trolls on 4chan made it their mission to find and remove the flag. With only the live video feed as a starting point, they triangulated aircraft flight paths, analyzed the movement of stars in the night sky, and even listened to frog croaks to narrow down the location. Within days, they had pinpointed the flag’s location in rural Tennessee and pulled it down. It was equal parts absurd and impressive, demonstrating how far a group of motivated strangers could push OSINT techniques.
A more serious example came after the January 6th Capitol riot. Law enforcement investigations were heavily supported by online communities who combed through livestreams, selfies, and public posts to identify individuals who participated. Amateur sleuths cataloged clothing, tattoos, and accessories, cross-referencing them with social media accounts and local news reports. Many of these identifications were later confirmed in court proceedings. What started as a chaotic event was transformed into a searchable archive, thanks to the persistence of people who wanted accountability.
These cases highlight two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, they show the enormous potential of open-source investigation, from geolocation techniques to collaborative analysis. On the other, they demonstrate how powerful and invasive this process can be when directed at a target, whether that target is a public art project or a criminal.
For cybersecurity, the lesson is clear: when people are motivated, they will go to extraordinary lengths with nothing more than public data. Attackers, activists, hobbyists, or even bored internet users can leverage the same techniques. The boundary between professional OSINT and amateur sleuthing is getting thinner every day.
Looking across all these examples, from TikTok fashion exposés to flag hunts and flight-tracking drama, the common factor isn’t expensive software or secret databases. It’s the mindset of the people doing the work.
Most successful sleuthing boils down to three qualities:
Excellent investigators don’t stop with the first dead end. If one catalog search doesn’t pan out, they’ll try another. If a clue seems insignificant, they’ll revisit it later. They treat the process like a puzzle, and puzzles aren’t fun unless you solve them.
The internet rewards those who uncover hidden truths. Sometimes, the reward is clout or a sense of justice. Other times, it’s just the thrill of proving a point. That motivation fuels the long hours of clicking, cross-referencing, and piecing things together.
Being “good at the internet” sounds trivial, but it’s a real skill. It means knowing how to reverse image search, how to read flight data, how to use Google operators effectively, or even how to identify which communities might have the knowledge to confirm a hunch.
In cybersecurity, professional OSINT analysts work the same way. They might use more specialized tools, but those tools are useless without curiosity and patience. A vulnerability researcher who finds an exposed database on Shodan is driven by the same instincts as a TikToker connecting the dots between a brand’s marketing claims and its supplier listings.
This is why OSINT can’t be written off as a purely technical discipline. It’s not about who has the fanciest toolkit; it’s about who’s willing to keep digging when others have stopped. And in today’s world, that persistence is just as likely to come from a teenager on Reddit as a professional in a cybersecurity team.
The rise of internet sleuthing isn’t just an entertaining cultural phenomenon—it carries real lessons for cybersecurity. The same traits that allow hobbyists to expose influencers or geolocate a flag apply directly to how organizations are investigated, attacked, or defended online.
The first lesson is that digital footprints are everywhere. Just as celebrities can’t hide their jet usage when flight data is public, companies can’t fully conceal exposed assets, misconfigured servers, or forgotten domains. Everything connected to the internet leaves a trace. If enough people care to look, those traces can and will be found.
The second lesson is that the barrier to entry is dropping. What used to require specialized tools or insider knowledge can now be done with free resources, search engines, and community collaboration. Amateur sleuths are proving that anyone with time and motivation can uncover sensitive details. This mirrors what we already see in bug bounty programs: thousands of people with varying backgrounds contributing to security by poking at systems from different angles.
The third lesson is that the threat landscape is broader than malicious hackers alone. Investigations can come from activists, journalists, competitors, or curious hobbyists. A company doesn’t have to be breached to face reputational damage, as Parke learned; all it takes is someone connecting the dots in public.
For defenders, this means recognizing that OSINT isn’t just a tool used by your security team or by attackers. It’s something anyone can wield. The best response isn’t to panic but to get ahead of it: know what your digital footprint looks like, understand what others can see, and prepare for the fact that those details might surface whether you like it or not.
While the rise of internet sleuthing can feel threatening to companies and individuals who find themselves under the microscope, there’s also a positive angle: many of these hobbyist investigators demonstrate skills that translate directly into cybersecurity.
Think about the skills required to spot that a brand’s products match items on Alibaba or to reverse image search a profile photo to expose a cheating scandal. These are the same analytical instincts required of professional OSINT analysts, vulnerability researchers, or threat intelligence specialists. These individuals are able to recognize patterns, test assumptions, and follow digital breadcrumbs until the full picture comes together.
We’re in the middle of a global cybersecurity skills shortage, so why not make the most of the skills that are surfacing from non-traditional sources? In cybersecurity, we often focus on technical training, learning to use Burp Suite, writing exploits, or understanding network protocols. But the most effective OSINT work isn’t always technical. It’s curiosity-driven. Many people who excel at online investigations didn’t start in security at all. They started in fandoms, activist circles, or hobbyist communities, and along the way, they developed an eye for inconsistencies and a drive to uncover the truth.
This is why the cybersecurity industry should pay attention. The next generation of OSINT analysts may not come from traditional career paths. They might emerge from TikTok communities, Reddit forums, or Discord groups, already equipped with the persistence and internet fluency that the job demands. For companies, there’s an opportunity here: instead of only recruiting based on formal certifications, recognize and encourage these skills wherever they appear.
The line between hobbyist sleuthing and professional security research is thinner than ever. If nurtured, today’s viral investigator could be tomorrow’s red teamer, threat intel analyst, or incident responder.
The cases discussed prove that no one is safe from the OSINT mindset. It often comes from ordinary people who are curious, motivated, and willing to keep digging long after most would have stopped.
For influencers and brands, this reality has been sobering. Carefully constructed images can unravel quickly when the public is able to investigate claims in real time. For organizations in cybersecurity, the lesson is just as clear: your digital footprint is visible, and motivated outsiders can and will piece it together.
But there’s another side to this story. These same skills—persistence, attention to detail, and internet fluency—are exactly what make great security analysts. OSINT is becoming a necessary skill, accessible to anyone with an internet connection and the will to use it. Whether the goal is exposing hypocrisy or defending systems, the principle is the same: the truth is usually out there, hidden in plain sight. The question isn’t whether the data exists but who’s curious enough to find it.