During my time with the government, I got to travel across the country and around the world, helping people with their OSINT problems and doing training. One thing that came up constantly was people wanting to improve their coding skills. I would always recommend Python because of how popular it is and how comparatively easy it is to learn compared to other programming languages.
Now, people often ask me: “Does an OSINT practitioner need to be able to program to be good at OSINT?” The answer is absolutely not. I’ve worked with some amazing, world-class OSINT practitioners who couldn’t code at all, and that’s exactly why we made such a good team. They were great at what they did, and I would help them out by building tools they needed for customized OSINT work. It was a really good working relationship.
But here’s the thing – I was recently chatting with some of my fellow SANS OSINT instructors, and one of them made a really good point. They said that being able to query an API and use the results is really becoming table stakes in our field. It’s moving from being a “nice to have” to a “need to have” skill. And that’s tough to argue with, because there are so many good data sources out there that are designed to give you data via an API, not through a web browser. We cover several of these in our SANS courses.
The good news is that the bar for getting started with code is lower than ever, thanks to AI resources like Cursor that can help us code. Even if you don’t want to become a programmer (and you don’t need to), there’s still a lot of value in being confident and comfortable with using APIs.
That’s why this week, I’m dedicating all of our blog posts (Monday through Friday) to getting started with APIs. Nothing fancy – just simple, straightforward, easy-to-use examples. The goal is to help you get to the point where you can query the data you need, get the response back, and turn it into something that’s actually usable for you.
Stay tuned – by the end of this week, you’ll have a solid foundation for working with APIs in your OSINT work.
