The Indicator Guide to Using Skills in Chrome for OSINT

Craig Silverman, Indicator: “Last month, Google announced Skills in Chrome, an easy way to create and save reusable prompts that can run in your browser. Skills load in the Gemini tab in Chrome, and you can summon them with just a couple of clicks. This makes them faster than a third-party tool (though potentially less powerful). Some of the Skills the company promoted at launch included one to quickly calculate protein macros for a recipe and to summarize a long document. But Skills can also be useful for repetitive OSINT tasks. I see them as great to use in conjunction with bookmarklets like the free ones from My OSINT Training.. I created three Skills that we’re making available to Indicator members to install in their browser. I also explain how I created them and how you can do it for yourself. As with any task involving an LLM, I needed to iterate through several versions of Skill prompts to catch errors and to ensure that the Skills worked as intended. I also encountered an issue where Gemini, Google’s chatbot, suggested integrating features that weren’t in fact possible. It was a good reminder to treat LLM outputs as useful but also potentially totally incorrect — even in cases when the model is suggesting things for the model itself to do. The three skills are:

  • ABC Profile Scan: Maps a social media profile — or a set of profiles across tabs — against the Actors, Behaviors, Content framework used to identify coordinated inauthentic behavior and influence operations. (It’s also useful for basic profile analysis.)
  • Entity Extractor: Pulls all named people, organizations, contact details, and social links from a weppage and presents them as labeled lists you can reformat as a spreadsheet.
  • Image Analysis: Extract the URLs for every image on the page and assess the images for potential AI-generation signals across anatomy, physics, texture, and context.

The Skills provide a quick and useful analysis or assessment of content on a page. They also point you to next steps and useful tools. Think of them as time-savers and data extractors that can speed up your workflow and, if you’re lucky, flag something that’s worth more analysis and investigation. When developing the skills, I incorporated tips and tools from multiple Indicator guides and other content….”

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