Week in OSINT #2020–20

Week in OSINT #2020–20

visualization search engine
Back to the usual weekly episodes, with the usual interesting links and the weekly 'Corona Section'.

Hello and welcome to another instalment of my weekly OSINT overview. This time some links may have been shared longer ago, since last week MW-Osint took over, talking about corporate intel. But this week we're back with the usual episode, with the following topics:

  • QResear.ch
  • AliceVision Meshroom
  • Facial Recognition
  • <5 Minute Tips
  • BotSight
  • OSINT and Social Engineering

Archive: QResear.ch

Gonzo shared an awesome link some time ago week, a site that indexes lots of niche topics, boards and documents and gives you the ability to search within the contents. Topics range from human trafficking to White House visitors and from 8Chan to Epstein's Blackbook.

Link: https://qresear.ch/

Tool: AliceVision Meshroom

If you have a whole bunch of photos of a particular scene and want to create a 3D model, then Meshroom is the way to go! Warning though, an Nvidia GPU with CUDA cores is required to run it, among a lot of memory (32GB recommended). They are working to incorporate 'Hipify' that also will make it run on AMD cards (yay!) but they aren't ready for that yet. Thanks for finding this awesome gem, Daniel Gallagher!

Link: https://alicevision.org/#meshroom

Blog: Facial Recognition

This is a series of two blogs by Lorenzo Romani explaining how to install and run your own facial recognition tool and create real life connections from photographs. It doesn't show you how to install ElasticSearch itself, but it will go over the settings, installing the script that encodes faces and so forth. And in the second part he shows you how to use that data to visualise it in Gephi.

Visualisation of people on photographs
Visualisation of people on photographs

Part 1: https://link.medium.com/5pv1Lsjga6

Part 2: https://link.medium.com/LEzAKz1sy6

Media: <5 Minute Tips

First Draft News have started uploading a ton of videos on their YouTube channel. And all of them are short clips with awesome hints. They have all kinds of topics, from recognising disinformation to reverse image search. So get over there and have a browse in their extensive archive of tutorials. Thanks for the tip Access OSINT!

Reverse image searching immunologists…
Reverse image searching immunologists…

Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0TIBS0JDWs3XPjVjcVPdEg/videos

Tool: BotSight

This new add-on I found last week might help with investigating fake accounts. Warning upfront: I had to use a VPN to view the site itself from a US endpoint. The tool dives into Twitter profiles, investigates the times they tweet at, amount of followers, creation time, type of activity and other indicators that are unknown to me. After that every account will get a rating, where 90% or higher is indicating a human account with normal interactions.

When a bot is spotted, or an account that might be suspicious, it will receive a different icon and a rating. It's absolutely not fool proof yet — as you can see below — and is still under development. But it can absolutely give you an indication of foul play when you are diving into Twitter profiles.

Link: https://download.botsight.nlok-research.me/

Chrome/Brave: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/botsight/kahiiipphdmmkkamddaiiddmidmhbbil/related
Firefox: https://download.botsight.nlok-research.me/resources/botsight-1.1.19-an%2Bfx.xpi

Article: OSINT and Social Engineering

Maxie Reynolds is the first professional that was interviewed for a series about social engineering. The interesting thing about this line of work is the amount of OSINT that goes into an assignment. From pre-text to blending in with the right clothes, open source intelligence is an importnat part of the job. If you like it, don't forget to read part 2 with Curt Klump where he talks about his first experiences in the field of walk-in tests, physical assessments, social engineering and related topics.

Part 1: https://www.social-engineer.com/an-inside-look-at-a-week-in-the-life-of-a-social-engineer/

Part 2: https://www.social-engineer.com/breaking-in-for-noobz-social-engineering-onsite-infiltration/

| DEF CON OSINT Talk

Let’s stay on the topic of social engineering and let me point you to a video of Ryan MacDougall, where he’s talking about OSINT during DEF CON 27 in the Social Engineering village.

Link: https://youtu.be/DSEGmdzs9Kg

| Free Books

Springer has a large library of free research material and e-books for you. Topics range from data analysis in Excel to archaeology and anything in between. So no matter what you are interested in, there is probably something in here for you. No registration needed, simply open the book, download the PDF or ePUB and that's it.

Links: https://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-type=%22Book%22&showAll=false

Have a good week and have a good search!

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