Practical OSINT Research Professional
The Practical OSINT Research Professional (PORP) certification is designed to validate individuals’ skills in gathering intelligence from publicly available sources. This certification offers an opportunity for individuals to demonstrate their proficiency in utilizing open-source intelligence techniques effectively.
Building the PORP
The Practical OSINT Research Professional certification is built on the TCM Security OSINT course — every question traces back to something the course teaches. But mapping content to questions was the easy part. The harder question was what the exam should actually measure.
OSINT is a field where the tooling changes constantly. Sites restrict access, APIs close, a technique that worked last quarter returns nothing this quarter. An exam that tests whether someone remembers the right tool is testing something with a short shelf life - and worse, it produces certified researchers who stall the moment their usual approach stops working.
So I wrote most of the questions to require methodology rather than recall. A candidate has to reason about what information would exist, where it would live, and how to pivot from what they've found to what they still need.
The grading and reporting standards followed the same logic. What I wanted at the end was a certification that means someone can run an investigation - not that they memorized a workflow that will be outdated in a year.