Using Notion for Cybersecurity Notes

Welcome back, aspiring hackers!
It’s Aircorridor here.

When we talk about OSINT or penetration testing, it’s important to remember that even the best work can be undermined by a poorly written report.
This is especially true for OSINT, where most investigations require analyzing huge amounts of data. But that’s not the only challenge — keeping track of small details is equally crucial.

That’s why I want to share some Notion features I’ve found useful for OSINT and cybersecurity in general.

Obsidian

I know a lot of people use Obsidian. I’ve tested it before, and I have nothing against it. However, I’d say Notion and Obsidian are designed for slightly different purposes.

Notion

Notion isn’t just a note-taking app — it’s a workspace that allows you to boost productivity by using various templates for project tracking, boards, and more.

At the time of writing, Notion offers a huge number of features, but in this article I’ll only scratch the surface.

If you’re using Notion as a single user, it’s completely free. To get started, you just need to visit the official website or install the application on Windows or macOS (a Linux version doesn’t exist).

When you open Notion for the first time, you’ll see a page similar to the one below.

By default, everything is ready to use, so we can start by looking at the sidebar. The “Private” section is your personal workspace, where you’ll be doing your work. The “Templates” section offers various templates for different purposes, such as trackers and more.

Let’s start creating our page. When you hover your cursor over the word “Private”, a plus sign will appear next to it. Clicking it lets you create a new page from scratch or choose one of the available templates.

Now, if you hover over our new page, you’ll see another plus sign next to it — this adds more pages to the section. However, it’s often more convenient to do this directly from within the page itself, so let’s open it.

Here, you can choose a cover — either from Notion’s ready-made images or by uploading your own — and change the page’s icon. These steps are optional, but it’s definitely worth giving the section a name to make navigation easier.

Inside this section, you can type text, add data, or insert new pages. To do this, hover over any line until a plus sign appears. Clicking it will open a menu where you can choose what to insert — plain text, headings, lists, toggles, quotes, and more.

Adding everything in one stack is not a good idea. It’s better to create a to-do list and tackle each task step by step, gradually filling out your workspace.

Any text you type can be selected to bring up a formatting menu. You can then edit it much like you would in any standard text editor.

Tables

Now we can create for example a table of people that found during OSINT investigation. For this we need to type “/table” and it will create an empty table with Name column. Then, in the right corner of the table, click on the three dots and select ‘New property’ from the menu that opens. There are already some templates here, so just add, for example: Date, Phone and Email. If you need something that is not in the templates, just insert a text field and name it as you wish.

Templates are more convenient to use because they define the data type. For example, where you selected Date, clicking on this cell will open a calendar. We can also add a column with the ID parameter, and each record will be automatically assigned a serial number.

In addition, the first column is the header, and if you hover your cursor over its cell, the ‘Open’ button will appear. Clicking on it will open the page for that particular record.

Here we will see the data that we have already entered into the table. We can also enter any information we need, including adding photos, links, or even adding an additional page for information specific to this entry.

Notion Timeline

Another feature that can be useful to us is the creation of a Timeline. It can be used to analyse events. This can be useful for identifying patterns and interrelationships.

Summary

Notion has been on the market for a while and has earned the trust of many users — and I think that trust is well-deserved, thanks to the powerful features this tool offers. In this article, I introduced you to the core capabilities of Notion. We covered creating files, organizing them, making to-do lists, building tables, and setting up timelines — all of which will help you start exploring this tool with more confidence and apply it to your cybersecurity needs.