NALI Annual Conference 2025

Chris Brenner

Title: OSINT Leveling Up

Chris is Associate Managing Director + Director of Technology for
221B Partners, a boutique investigations firm in Chicago. He has over 15 years of experience as an investigator helping organizations make challenging decisions and identify risks, threats, and vulnerabilities that may impact their assets, people, or reputations.

Combining a passion for identifying and unraveling clues and solving puzzles with technology led Chris down a path focusing not only on traditional due diligence, background and corporate investigations but also open source (OSINT) research, analysis and investigations
utilizing technology when and wherever possible.

From geolocation of photos and video to writing Python scripts to web scraping to link analysis of thousands of data points, he has put these skills to use to collect, analyze and visualize data for countless due diligence investigations, complex investigations, threat investigations and security assessments for Fortune 500 companies, private equity, non-profits, government entities, academic institutions, private clients and family offices.

He has been a featured speaker for organizations such as OSMOSIScon, the Defense Personnel and Security Research Center/National Insider Threat Task Force, the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) and the SANS Institute. Chris holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Law Enforcement and Justice Administration from Western Illinois University and is Open-Source Certified by the OSMOSIS Institute.