Week in OSINT #2019-50

Week in OSINT #2019-50

maps visualization search engine domains tiktok
It’s the end of the year! Time to take some time off, after sharing some of last weeks links and some random rambling.

This will be the last Week in OSINT of 2019, since it is that time of year again that I am going to take a few weeks off. I did the same last year, when I stopped at episode number 49. Besides the fact I’m going to be extremely busy for the coming weeks, I’m also going to enjoy the holidays without any pressure of pushing out another ‘weekly’. But of course there are still a few things for today to cover, like:

  • TikTok Leads
  • F4Map
  • OSM Buildings
  • Forum Search Engines
  • Unfurl
  • Overview of 2019

Article: TikTok Leads

AccessOSINT wrote an article on TikTok last week and shares with us some goodies that can be found in there. He also fives us insight into how to pivot from phone numbers, use other social media or Lampyre to get an overview of a target.

Link: https://medium.com/@osint/tiktok-using-osint-to-discover-new-leads-f7e6c27601d1

Site: F4Map

A few days ago Bertram Hill shared an online 3D map service that I didn’t know yet, called F4Maps. In well known places, like in London, the level of detail is staggeringly beautiful. But also in remote places where normally no 3D buildings are modelled, F4Maps provide you with at least some basic extrusions to work with. Besides that, they provide a nice menu where you can switch between day and night and have a look at how a shadow can fall around noon. A nice map provider that can give you some extra insight in unknown places!

The level of detail at certain places The level of detail at certain places

Link: https://demo.f4map.com

Site: OSM Buildings

The level of detail in OSM maps The level of detail in OSM maps

And in the thread about F4Maps Friedrich Hartmann shared another map service, called OSM Buildings. The level of detail is a lot lower, but when testing both map services, this one was a lot less heavy in the browser too. Both of these 3D maps run entirely in the browser, so I would suggest not to click on the links if you only have 4GB of memory in your computer.

Link: https://osmbuildings.org/

Links: Forum Search Engines

Sprp77 is back with some nice links! This time it is all about forums, and not so much the content inside, but the topics. So in case you are looking for a specific topic to investigate, you can use one of these sites to find the perfect forum to boost your results!

BoardReader: https://boardreader.com/

Craigslist: https://forums.craigslist.org/

CSE: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=002396771074467716933:gkp6fzl_dv0

LindaForum: https://www.findaforum.net/

Delphi: http://forums.delphiforums.com/ (requires registration)

Boardhost: http://listings.boardhost.com/

Tool: Unfurl

The last topic before diving into this years overview is a tip that was shared by GONZO last week, the tool Unfurl. It takes a long and complex URL and divides it into snippets, explaining each parameter or part within that URL. It may give you some more insight into some really complex or long URL’s. Thanks for sharing!

Disecting a twitter search Disecting a twitter search

Article: https://dfir.blog/introducing-unfurl/

GitHub: https://github.com/obsidianforensics/unfurl

Live: https://dfir.blog/unfurl/

Overview of 2019

This year has been quite a year for the OSINT community. In June we lost the ability to access the Facebook graph in an easy way for instance. Thankfully people like D Nemec and Henk van Ess started diving into the changes and came up with new ways of getting to the data, resulting in sowdust creating a new tool. And at OSINTcurious we also spent some time writing about not one, but two articles about this.

Also in June we lost the online tools that were provided by Michael Bazzell via his Inteltechniques website. For years that site was the absolute number one when it came to new tools and techniques, right from your browser! The only positive side is that the focus shifted from ready made tools, to teach some of the underlying techniques, which resulted in his latest book about Open Source Intelligence.

After Inteltechniques went down, we did see a lot of new tools being added by IntelX.io, which has been an awesome resource so far. Besides that, another awesome site started to expand their online toolbox: Aware Online! Websites like this give us OSINT-ers an easy way of doing some basic tasks, and can help speed up some investigations. So thank you for that!

This has also been the year of OSINTcurious, that I mentioned a few times before in my newsletter. When we started the platform in December 2018 with a few OSINT enthusiasts, we didn’t know it would be received that well. Dozens of webcasts, a bunch of blog articles and a lot of 10 minute tips were created, sharing not just techniques, but also out insights and working when it comes to OSINT.

And besides that, also the Quiztime Twitter community has been awesome. The amount of followers grew way over 10k people, we sent out hundreds of geolocation and fact checking quizzes, we gave talks at conferences and shared some new articles on the Quiztime blog at Medium.

Quiztime getting ready for GIJN Quiztime getting ready for GIJN

It is time to close off this year with this final news letter, and I promise I’ll be back early January with a brand new series of Week in #OSINT! And until then I can already spoil that later this month the Quiztime crew will be posting a new interactive OSINT quiz! So you won’t have to be bored until I return…

Have a good week and have a good search!

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