Not every source is OSINT, and the label affects what you can say and do with it. Some information comes from your own systems, and some comes from a paid vendor. Here is a Northwind Health case that separates the three:
Northwind Health, a regional hospital with 1,200 staff, has a security team that gets tips every week. A staff member forwards a strange link. A forum post claims hospital logins are for sale. A vendor mentions a problem in a bulletin. Each tip needs an answer, and the answer must hold up when someone asks how you know. This course teaches you to produce that kind of answer using open source intelligence.
Open source intelligence (OSINT) is information anyone can lawfully access without special privileges, such as public records, domain registration data, code repositories, and public forum posts. Defenders use it to learn what an attacker could see about their organization.
Every investigation in this course follows one path, from the first lead to a handoff to the incident response (IR) team, who run the hospital’s response to a confirmed security problem. Each step produces something a colleague can check.