When it comes to IoT or other online devices, there are quite a lot of options to investigate them. It is possible that you are working as a penetration tester that needs some information on a client, but also an investigator that is looking into online activity can use some of these skills. Why might it be a good idea to look at an IP … Continue reading Searching with Shodan
Guest blog by BOsintBlanc. Discord for the uninitiated is a group chat service in the vein of Telegram, Whatsapp, or IRC (if you’re that old ;-P). Channels are set up as ‘servers’ usually based around a shared topic of interest. As of 2020 Discord had over 300 million registered users (source) and that number does not appear to be dwindling any time soon. What does … Continue reading Investigating Discord: A Primer
After an exciting week where the whole world was tracking the EVER GIVEN, the large container ship stuck in the Suez Canal, we put together a live stream to discuss Maritime OSINT! In this stream, we talked about various ways to track the movements of vessels large and small. We also talked about ways to use social media, job boards, real-estate, and shipspotting sites to … Continue reading Maritime Live Stream Notes 4/1/21
OSINT is about focusing on possibilities. But sometimes we get stuck or things we planned simply didn’t work as planned. We all know when things in our daily life don’t work we reset it. If the tv doesn’t work we reset it by turning it off and on. Your smartphone glitches or apps hang and we reset the apps or the entire device. We can … Continue reading Using RESET for better OSINT
This Ten Minute Tip is the first in a series looking at how we can geolocate images as part of OSINT work. Being able to examine a picture and work out when and where it was taken is an increasingly important skill to have. You could be a journalist trying to document human rights abuses, or helping law enforcement trace victims of child abuse. Whatever … Continue reading Ten Minute Tip: Image Geolocation – Part 1
This blogpost is made after a 10minute video I made for the virtual conference OSMOSIS 2020 and was inspired @hatless1der blogpost. Probably every OSINT investigator has encountered this problem; you’ve found your targets Facebook profile but it is completely private. So what can you do? Clicking the buttons One of the ways to start is by ‘clicking the buttons’. On a Facebook-profile there are quite … Continue reading What to do when a Facebook profile is private?
Guest blog by Sarah Womer Have you ever looked at a residential property in the USA and wondered who owns it versus who lives there? Zillow provides a helpful user interface to find that out. In addition, the tool can sometimes provide information on whether the property is up to date on its property taxes, what the owner’s current mailing address is, where they may … Continue reading Won’t You Be My Neighbor: Zillow + State/County Property Assessor Data
To be clear, online OSINT investigations can cause trauma, severe trauma. This is something that people rarely talk about and it’s highly underestimated by many. Let’s face it a lot of OSINT analysts, online investigators, and investigative journalists expose themselves a lot to all the horrors this world has to offer. War, child abuse, and terrorism are just a few subjects. Each of these subjects … Continue reading Vicarious trauma and OSINT – a practical guide
Guest blog by OsintDunny 360 virtual tours have been utilized by businesses, insurance companies, general contractors, and real estate agents for the past few years as a tool to capture the current state of a property. The emergence of COVID-19 has only increased the use of these 360 virtual tours. The current industry leader for software solutions regarding 360 virtual tours is the California based … Continue reading Guide to Harnessing the Power of 360 Virtual Tours for Everyday Investigations.
Micah Hoffman (WebBreacher), The OSINT Curious Project President, shows how to use a combination of Google Chrome and Instant Data Scraper to extract HTML table data from the ViewDNS.info web site. Then, once that is saved in a CSV on the local system, Micah demonstrates how to import the CSV into Maltego’s Casefile product to visualize and analyze the OSINT data. Continue reading Data Scraping and Visualizing using Instant Data Scraper, ViewDNS.info, and Maltego
