Today opened new room at TryHackMe – Overheard at Breakfast.

The room is short but enjoyable. For people still learning OSINT, it provides a useful introductory challenge. My main takeaway, however, is how quickly modern automation tools can solve this type of task—and often in several different ways.

In this post, I will demonstrate three approaches:

a manual, old-school investigation.

a free and open-source tool;

a commercial OSINT platform;

Non commercial

For this we simply will use Holehe (https://github.com/megadose/holehe). Holehe checks if an email is attached to an account on sites like twitter, instagram, imgur and more than 120 others.

1. Spin up your VM
2. pip3 install holehe 🙂
3. holehe [email protected]

And result is very fast.

Commercial

It provides functionality similar to Holehe, but presents the findings through a more polished interface and may include additional enrichment.

In this particular challenge, the results were effectively the same, although the commercial platform displayed them in a cleaner and more convenient format.

Manual “old school” 😀

Automation is useful, but relying on tools too heavily can create false confidence.

It is important to understand where the information comes from and how to validate it manually. Automated tools do not always parse every useful detail, and some findings may be outdated, incomplete, or incorrect.

In this case, the communication included a reference to a platform beginning with the letter “G.”

By manually reviewing the available clues and checking Gravatar, we can locate the relevant profile without depending entirely on automated enrichment tools.

1. Review communication. There is mention of “G” platform… google.. godddle, gaspacho.. ah no.. Gravatar. 🙂

Grand finale

In the end results were the same. We get profile from Gravat with next lead.. Looks like base64, use Cyberchef and result is near.

Small remark. Gravatar also reveals an additional useful detail: the profile creation date. In this case, the account was created 15 days earlier (and I’m used to do everything in last moment.. eh :D).

This type of metadata may not directly solve the challenge, but in a real investigation it could help establish a timeline, assess whether an account was recently created for a specific operation, or support links between related activity.

And final result from CyberChef

Conclusion

This room demonstrates an important OSINT principle: the same result can often be reached through several investigative paths.

Automated and commercial tools are excellent for speed and scale, but analysts should still understand the underlying data sources and validate important findings manually. The strongest workflow combines automation, source awareness, and human analysis.