Hi. You’ve reached this page because you’ve followed someone’s link on an old web page. You were probably looking for details about the SEC487 OSINT course I wrote….and those details are not here anymore.
Moving On
Aftering severing my authoring and teaching relationships with the SANS Institute in January 2022, I stopped developing the SEC487 OSINT course. Instead, I’ve turned my attention to the new trainings at my online training site: https://myosint.training.
I truly enjoyed writing, maintaining, and teaching the SEC487 for years and appreciate all SANS did to help people learn OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) skills.
SEC487 versus My OSINT Training (MOT)
I took the lessons I’d learned from the SEC487 course-building and teaching experiences and created a training site that is exceeding the growing needs of over 1,000 international students. I’ve captured some of the differences between the old SEC487 course and the new materials on MOT below:
| Issue | SEC487 | My OSINT Training (MOT) https://myosint.training |
|---|---|---|
| Course Format | Single, monolithic course. You buy the course and get 6 days worth of content whether you know certain topics or not. | Many, smaller, topic-focused courses that you can purchase as a bundle or individually. You choose the topics you want to learn. Take all the courses or just what you need. |
| Price | List price, as of this writing, is over $8,200 USD | Most courses are sold individually at less than $300 or as a bundle for $500 |
| Sensitive Content | Since this course had to “work” in any location we taught it internationally, I had to choose topics that offended the least number of people. This meant that as much as my students wanted me to teach about topics like OSINT in war zones and conflicts or Asian social media apps, since it might not have been well-received by people of a country where we taught the class, I couldn’t include it in the materials. | Courses cover a huge variety of OSINT topics. People that might get offended by certain materials can choose to not take those courses. |
| Topics | With 5 days of teaching material and 1 day of a group capstone event. there was only so much time that we could dedicate to teaching and only so much content could fit into those hours. So I focused SEC487 on the most common skills and techniques everyone wanted to or needed to learn. This meant that many specific topics students had requested could not be accommodated. | With no daily or hourly teaching contraints, our authors can create courses as long as needed to ensure that you truly learn the OSINT skills you want. Some of our courses are 30 minutes long and some contain hours of engaging content. |
| Author(s) | I was the sole author of SEC487. Always was. While that was incredibly empowering to me to write the course the way I thought it should be presented, it also meant that the courseware, examples, and exercises were not as diverse as could be. I could only write about what I knew about OSINT and there were gaps in the content. | At MOT, my philosophy is simple, get the best people, that are doing amazing things in OSINT to share their knowledge with you. Yes, I make MOT courses but others are beginning to as well and with their experiences you get better products. |
I understand that the SEC487 course will be retired in the coming year and be replaced by a new OSINT course. That is exciting news for SANS students. Interested in that course? Try Googling: site:sans.org “osint”.
With the amazing instructors, affordable course prices, and the variety of courses at My OSINT Training (https://myosint.training) there are barriers to you training to learn a single OSINT skill or taking all the trainings and becoming an OSINT expert!