Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Reporting online today, journalists have to battle astroturf campaigns, fake news sites and sketchy shell companies to find out who is behind the story. It frequently leads to a frustratingly common question: who is behind this website?

Popular tools and approaches to investigating websites have been less reliable lately. There's more opaqueness in areas where there should be more transparency; crypto payments add a layer of confusion, and generative AI makes it easy for adversarial actors to operate hundreds of websites.

Using a range of OSINT tools and real-world investigations, we will walk you through investigating the provenance and ownership of websites: identifying the scope and scale of the network it belongs to — if any? Who’s behind the site, now and in the past? Who are the main actors promoting this website? Is it AI slop? Are foreign actors likely behind the domain?

While it is not always possible to fully unmask the owner of a site, using a thorough checklist of tools and techniques that we have used in real-world investigations we can help you make sure to reveal as much as possible about a website, and potentially uncover important clues. We will also walk you through how to conduct these investigations safely depending on your threat model, and how to document your findings reliably.

 This session is suitable for beginners and doesn't assume existing technical knowledge.