Week in OSINT #2020–26
The last newsletter before taking a long break, with some new articles, tutorials and sites for you to play with!
As stated in last week's newsletter, I'm going to enjoy a little break. Every year I'm taking some time off during the holidays and Christmas, and this year is no exception. I want to contribute to OSINTcurious again, have some research to do, draft some new blog posts and will be doing some behind the scene things for myself. But enough chatting, it's time to go over to the of items, so you all have some things to do the coming weeks! Enjoy!
- Saving Videos
- Facebook’s New Design
- Freedar
- Historical Aircraft Info
- TraceLabs Contestant Guide
- PimEyes
- Passive DNS
- Railcab Rides
- Hi-Res ProRail Aerial Photos
Tutorial: Saving Videos
Chris from OSINT Combine has created a short tutorial on how to save videos from different social media platforms. By leveraging the 'developer tools' within a browser he shows you how you can identify the media, and what steps you need to take to save the video. Of course there are tools out there that can do this, but I think it's important to know how the technique works in case something breaks.
Link: https://www.osintcombine.com/post/download-social-media-videos-without-tools
Tip: Facebook’s New Design
This is a Twitter thread on the new Facebook design. Some things are best done in the new layout, others can only be seen in the old version. So be prepared to switch back and forth, while researching someone. And the always #osintcurious Technisette has been so lovely to figure all kinds of goodness that is available to us in the new layout, or for what items you better switch back to the old theme.
Link: https://twitter.com/technisette/status/ 1271343646407823361
Site: Freedar
Nixintel shared a new free Airplane tracking website, called Freedar. It has the basic layout of VirtualRadar, the most used open source ADS-B tracking platform out there. And this one also doesn't filter out private planes or military aircrafts, since it's based on the open and unfiltered feeds of ADSBexchange. One little tip though, don’t forget to switch to the world feed, by going to the menu and under ‘receiver’ select the option ‘Freedar.uk World feed’ to see more than just the UK.
Link: https://radar.freedar.uk/VirtualRadar/desktop.html
Site: Historical Aircraft Info
If you are interested in the history of a specific airplane, like the one featured above, I suggest you visit a Dutch website. On ADS-B.nl you can search for a specific aircraft and see three months of historical data regarding flight paths of any captured aircraft in its database. By clicking on the little map icon on the right in the result list you can visualise the flight path.
Link: http://www.ads-b.nl/
Tutorial: TraceLabs Contestant Guide
The community has come together and has written a guide for the TraceLabs missing persons CTF's. This ain't a guide on how to search for people, but this will tell you some basic methodology, what is and isn't allowed, the scoring system et cetera. And when going over this guide, I actually noticed this can be used for every investigation out there. Because a lot of things apply to the daily work of OSINT-ers out there. So I would recommend this document to all people that are new in OSINT, and of course for the ones that want to start participating in a TraceLabs CTF. Just to get a better understanding of the do's and don'ts in these type of investigations.
Link: http://download.tracelabs.org/Trace-Labs-OSINT-Search-Party-CTF-Contestant-Guide_v1.pdf
Site: PimEyes
I've seen it in my Twitter timeline many times. I've read about it more than once. I've used it a few times. I've heard people mention it on webcasts. And it still was never featured in my newsletter. Until now! Thanks Stefanie Proto! PimEyes is a Polish website that offers some solid facial recognition and is extremely easy. Even though it has a premium version that shows you where images showed up, or that gives you the ability to be notified when photos of a specific person are indexed, the free version is more than enough to get more photos. An extension or add-on like 'Search by Image' will open the world to new results you want to follow up on.
Link: http://pimeyes.com/
Tutorial: Passive DNS
To understand how the domain naming system works, is important nowadays if you are researching things on the internet. Lots of people have their own website, companies have their digital shopping windows, webshops might have your interest, and they all use a domain name. How you can investigate those domains, can be read in this article by Tek! And after you finished reading, and you are curious about digital certificates, then do revisit the blog I wrote last year about it here.
Certificates: https://osintcurio.us/2019/03/12/certificates-the-osint-gift-that-keeps-on-giving/
Media: Railcab Rides
Say that you have an almost impossible geolocation job to do. And you have a hunch where it might be… The only way to try and confirm is to find photos or videos in a place where there are no StreetView images or Mapillary captures. But there is a train ride nearby, that could be useful! This actually happened to me, and even though I found footage by hand, the next website is an awesome resource to a very specific scala of footage!
Link: https://railcabrides.com/en/
Media: Hi-Res ProRail Aerial Photos
While writing the last pieces of text for this newsletter, I noticed that this site was actually down. It's up and running again and I must say, this is an awesome website! It features aerial photography of the Dutch rail road lines and stations, in the highest resolution I’ve ever seen! The resolution is insane due to the fact they used a low flying helicopter with hi-res camera equipment to make these. Enjoy!
Link: https://twiav.nl/nl/luchtfoto_prorail.php
FUNINT: We are OSINT!
Social Links tweeted an awesome mosaic the other day, made from avatars of people using the hashtag #OSINT. Thank you for doing this, andI thought this would be an awesome ending for now… See you all in a few weeks!
4128×2322: http://files.mtg-bi.com/we_are_OSINT.jpg
8256×4644: http://files.mtg-bi.com/we_are_OSINT_by_SocialLinks.tif
Have a good week and have a good search!
