TGXTRACT: The all-in-one Telegram investigation kit
Link to tool: https://downloads.osintersect.com
It has been a long-time in the making. After many months of development (accelerated by AI) and sleepless nights, TGXTRACT is finally released. So firstly, what is TGXTRACT? The phrase “Swiss Army Knife” is very overused when describing OSINT tools and platforms, but it does fit with idea we had when looking for an open-source scraper and analysis tool that is purpose built for Telegram. Many skilled coders have formed the inspiration for TGXTRACT along the way, a huge thank you goes to Valdemar Balle of Darksight Analytics for his support and inspiration! But what is TGXTRACT meant to be; in our opinion, a problem solver.
The problem we repeatedly encountered while engaging with various European, UK and Ukrainian agencies was the fundamental lack of solutions that could extract data from Telegram via the API and secure it in a way that could be used as evidence. Obtaining Telegram content via the Telegram web-interface is problematic, not all media and posts are visible there. Also, scraping via a command-line interface using a single API is too slow especially when dealing with channels and groups containing a lot of media. The solution (though incomplete for many) is TGXTRACT.
How it works is quite complex – it needs to be! Firstly, it uses multiple API keys to maintain a steady-rate of scraping. Secondly, the more API’s it uses, the more faster it scrapes. There is a method behind the madness, to put it mildly! That said, it works as a desktop solution, running locally, and it will extract all available data from a given channel and / or group; then it will present extracted data in a single unified view and enable the analyst / investigator to turn scraped data into evidence through the built in report.
The months of development, though tedious, has been incredibly quite productive since we have created then OSINTERSECT DB, enabling law enforcement and official agencies to reverse lookup Telegram users. All of this is free and will remain free so long as it is maintained.
The question is now; where do we go from here, what’s next? Soon, we will look to integrate TGXTRACT with VKXTRACT by request of our friends in Ukraine. This will enable them to locally extract, triage, and report on data that is most important to them. But, bigger and better things are most certainly in the pipeline and we are looking forward to how productive we can be in the next twelve months!
To learn more about TGXTRACT, make sure to visit the page that provides an explainer as to what it does and how it functions: https://osintersect.com/tgxtract
