Week in OSINT #2020-10
A small overview of interesting things that caught my OSINT-aware eye last week.
While I've been extremely busy last week with work and doing some catching up on digital forensic techniques, the rest of the Twitterverse and beyond shared lots of nice links. I know it's just a small section of everything I am able to read during the week, but you'll have to do it with this small overview:
- Email to Twitter Account
- Hi-res Instagram Images
- SIFT
- Morph.io
- Microsoft Video Indexer
Tutorial: Email to Twitter Account
Aware Online shared one of his older tutorial last week on how it is still possible to find Twitter users via a known email address. Even though it is a blog post from December last year, this is one of the many useful blog posts he has written on his website. So make sure you follow him and keep an eye out for new blog posts!
★ #OSINT tip ★ Find Twitter accounts by email
— Aware Online (@aware_online) March 3, 2020
1. Sign in on Gmail
2. Open "Contacts"
3. Add email address of target
4. Sign in on Twitter
5. Download "GoodTwitter" add-on
6. Open privacy settings
7. Click "Find friends"
8. Upload Gmail contacts
9. Have fun! #socmint
Link: https://www.aware-online.com/en/email-to-twitter-account/
Tip: Hi-res Instagram Images
Aric Toler from Bellingcat shared a post about archiving websites and media. One tip that caught my eye was re-shared by Julia Bayer, and has to do with getting the largest resolution image from an Instagram post. Neat little tip, but also a really good blogpost in general about archiving online media!
Tip: Instagram photos in high resolution and as a jpg file:
— Julia Bayer (@bayer_julia) March 4, 2020
1. Take the photo post URL
2. remove everything behind the photo ID
3. add "/media/?size=l" 👉 https://t.co/pJTZDcbz2k
More on archiving here: https://t.co/sRILlekqxh
Link: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2018/02/22/archive-open-source-materials/
Tip: SIFT
Tilman saw a post by Will Oremus about fighting the constant stream of ‘fake news’ online. The blog post is focused on the Coronavirus, but his acronym can be used for all types of investigations: SIFT!
Link: https://onezero.medium.com/amp/p/4b7995448071
If you want to know a bit more about this, then also read the post by Mike Caulfield on SIFT here: https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/
Site: Morph.io
The blog by Angelica should have its own section in this news letter (click here for that one 👉 LINK), but that has been shared by so many people, you must have seen it! So let me just use that as a segue for a different scraping tool. Because last week Stefanie Proto @Sprp77 shared a link to Morph.io, an online scraper platform. You code whatever scraper you need, on GitHub, in the language of your choice, you set it up and let it run once every so often in the cloud. Never touching your targets, scraping along whatever you need. But… It will be all public, that's the downside of the platform 😉
Link: https://morph.io/
Guide to build a web scraper: https://medium.com/better-programming/the-only-step-by-step-guide-youll-need-to-build-a-web-scraper-with-python-e79066bd895a
Article: Microsoft Video Indexer
Matthias Wilson wrote a blog about using the Video Indexer platform from Microsoft to automatically index, transcribe and categorise footage. Automatic tagging of topics, facial recognition, automatic timeline generation and search option are all available. Looking for another project to play with? Here you go!
Link: https://keyfindings.blog/2020/03/08/using-the-microsoft-video-indexer-for-osint/
Have a good week and have a good search!
