Kirby Plessas is an OSINT pioneer, US military veteran, business owner, board member, is OSC certified and podcast host. Kirby was an Arabic linguist in the military who started sharing what she knew with team members in a newsletter and it grew from there.

She is the founder of the Plessas Experts Network which offers training, classes and webinars in OSINT investigations. She also co-hosts the OSINT Cocktail podcast where they talk about investigations and techniques seen in movies and television shows.

Craig Taylor is the founder and CEO of CyberHoot a security awareness company that focuses on positive reinforcement and gamification. Craig studied psychology and used that knowledge when creating CyberHoot, which he offers for free.

Craig also set up a challenge specifically for listeners of the Layer 8 Podcast, if you'd like to test your ability to identify a phish and the parts of a phish quickly. It's even free! You can try that out here: https://cps.cyberhoot.com/hootphish-challenge/?hash=65199056c6edbc93f2755078a5b15743

There will be a leaderboard, and you can check your status on the leaderboard here: https://cps.cyberhoot.com/hootphish-challenge/shared-results/?hash=8b7f346b97c7dd027215d741f0ae36fb

This free challenge will end on May 31, 2025.

Tim Farmer is the OSINT Training Lead for Dark Blue at CACI. He performs investigations along with teaching OSINT classes with a focus on the deep and dark web. (Don't know the difference? We discuss that in this episode.) Tim has his own podcast with Chris, titled The OSINT Output. Tim has achieved the OSC certification from Osmosis Academy and will be presenting at the Layer 8 Conference this year with a talk titled "Deanonymizing Dark Web Hidden Services: Capitalizing on User Mistakes and Querying Internet of Things Databases"