This post consists of best OSINT courses for beginners which are absolutely free along with a brief description and review of each.

Hello everyone, Welcome to the "Top 10 OSINT Series" your definitive guide to the top resources in Open-Source Intelligence. Whether you're a seasoned analyst or just beginning your OSINT journey, this series is crafted to provide you with the best courses, books, tools, techniques, and many more.

Let’s start with the series with the best free courses for learning OSINT for beginners.

Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) in 5 Hours by The Cyber Mentor

Course Duration - 4.5 hours

Target Audience - Complete Beginners (who have zero knowledge of OSINT)

What you will learn - It will give you a brief overview of OSINT, note taking, sock puppets, google dorks, reverse image searching, geolocation, breached data, people search engines and social media OSINT.

Review/Personal Opinion -

It’s one of the most popular free courses and it’s loved by beginners. I have completed this course back in 2021 when i was a complete beginners in OSINT and I really liked. It gives you a rough idea of what you are going to learn in this domain, so I genuinely recommended this course. But I also believe, this course is over hyped, many people recommended this course as a beginner would become expert by completing this little course. It will just give you an introduction to different topics in OSINT, don’t keep any high expectations from it.

OSINT At Home by Benjamin Strick

Course Duration - Undefined

Target Audience - Everyone (useful for all OSINT lovers)

What you will learn - Technically, this is not a course, it’s a playlist where new videos get added regularly. As of today, it has some amazing videos on topics like reverse image search, geolocation, image OSINT, Google Dorking.

Review/Personal Opinion -

This is one of my favorite playlists which is still my first recommendation when someone asks me resources for learning GeoINT. Every new video of the playlist has something new to teach and I am follower of this person from my early days when i was new in OSINT.

10 Minute (or less!) OSINT Tips by OSINT Curious Project

Course Duration - Approx 5.5 hours

Target Audience - Beginner’s and Intermediate

What you will learn - This is again not a course, but a playlist. It is not targeted on any particular topic, so can’t say what exact topics you will be learning, but you will be learning a lot of new things.

Review/Personal Opinion -

This is an amazing playlist of some awesome videos created by OSINT Curious, which was run by some amazing OSINT Experts like Sector035, Wondersmith Rae, OSINT Techniques and some others. I highly recommended completing this playlist or if you want, i share my short notes for this playlist which I created last year. Drop a comment if you want and will see where to post them.

An Introduction to Open-Source Intelligence by Security Blue Team

Course Duration - Depends on you

Target Audience - Beginners

What you will learn - It is a learning-based course. You will be doing challenges on the topics and tools like The Harvester, TweetDeck, Google Dorks, OSINT Framework, Reverse Image Searching.

Review/Personal Opinion -

This is not a course which will teach you from the basics, instead it’s a learning-based course which will teach you how to apply OSINT for solving problems in CTFs and in real world. Start this course, when you have foundational knowledge of OSINT or in other words, when you have completed the three above mentioned courses. I really suggest this course as it will teach you how to tackle the problems and how to think.

Open-source Intelligence by Basel Institute of Governance

Course Duration - Depends on you

Target Audience - Anyone

What you will learn - It’s a learning based interactive course. Here, you will be learning the basics of OSINT, searching in databases, fundamentals of WebINT and SOCMINT.

Review/Personal Opinion -

When I completed this course last year, i loved this as it’s an interactive, rather than watching some boring videos, i was solving case with my learning and knowledge in OSINT. I highly recommend this course as it simulates a real-world investigation and gives you the confidence in your skill when you finish the course.

Open source intelligence (OSINT) Tutorials by TechChip

Course Duration - Undefined

Target Audience - Beginners

What you will learn - Here, you will be learning about different OSINT tools and techniques in Hindi.

Review/Personal Opinion - 
This is another playlist which has some really good videos for beginners but it’s in Hindi language. I have watched some videos in playlist, and I liked those. Sorry for those don’t understand Hindi.

Maltego for Cybercrime Investigations by Maltego 

Course Duration - 1 hour or less

Target Audience - Everyone (useful for all OSINT lovers)

What you will learn - It is a learning-based course. You will be learning how to use Maltego for investigation, how to investigate a phone number, email address, person’s name.

Review/Personal Opinion -

I would recommend this course to those who wants to learn how to use Maltego as a tool for their Investigations, this course have enough resource to get started with Maltego and Personally I would suggest to go through this course because Maltego is a highly used tool in the industry and learning how to use it will help you a lot.

So, these are my favorite course which i suggest to any beginner who approached for asking for resources. There are many other free courses and playlists for OSINT, some of them will be good and some will be bad too. But i only recommended those resources which I myself have used or am sure of their quality. I don’t want to give any bad advice or any advice which can be harm anyone in the future.

Some other free courses are -

The Complete Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) Training Course

OSINT Training

Note - I don’t have any idea about the quality of these two courses.

That’s it for this issue. Like it and share it with your friends who are interested in OSINT.