Week in OSINT #2022-15
Welcome to the Easter version of Week in OSINT, with some tips, sites, info on crypto scams and an actual Easter Egg!
Once in a while I slip in an 'east egg' (example), since I like to have you, as a reader, to look beyond the text that you're seeing. I love to challenge people to stay curious, and to find ways to see what else it out there. So make sure to look beyond the articles I feature this week:
- Blockchain Detectives
- Webmii
- Redditle
- On Google Queries
- CBR OSINT CTF
- Hadzy
Ah! You found an east egg so it seems... Did you know that one of the images in this episode was used before? Yup, indeed! Why don't you search for it yourself with: google.com/search?q=site%3Asector035.nl+tara+winstead+pexels
Article: Blockchain Detectives
When I saw the presentation by Michael James on Web3.0, I realized this was still uncharted territory for me. When reading this VICE article, I found out he isn't the only one diving into this. The article talks about how people investigate crypto hackers and scams out there. An interesting read, with some good examples of scams that have been out there.
Link: https://www.vice.com/en/...
Site: Webmii
@Bashinho_Bash was wondering what people search engines worked best in the EU, and got told that Webmii is one of them. Looking at what it does under water, it seems to be a Google CSE and after a few searches it doesn't retrieve any information for me anymore, due to 'suspicious traffic'. If anyone has better website, do reach out to him and let him know, or share it over at The OSINT Curious Project Discord server!
Link: https://webmii.com/
Site: Redditle
Over at Discord I stumbled upon a really nice link, shared by SlayerLarom#1204. It's basically a Google search, but with a nice frontend, and without the advertisement we all love so much And for once, this is a tool that even has the source code published on GitHub. So if you want to, you could even host your own search engine!
GitHub: https://github.com/greentfrapp/redditle
Tip: On Google Queries
When I was testing Redditle and Webmii, I found out that they returned no results after only a couple of searches. Since both websites are basically performing a Google search, or run a CSE in the background, we all know what happens. Google doesn't seem to like multiple queries in rapid succession, especially when using advanced search operators. At that moment, you need some way to overcome a CAPTCHA. Both Webmii and Redditle don't have anything to do so, and you'll find yourself with a website that isn't returning anything after a few minutes. So make sure to practice manual Google searches, because nothing beats some good old manual labour!
And to help you out a bit more, here's a fairly recent blog post by Matteo Duò, where he discusses 40 different Google search operators.
Link: https://kinsta.com/blog/google-search-operators/
Site: CBR OSINT CTF
Twitter user @IFLinfosec created an OSINT CTF over at TryHackMe, where he added some of the CTF questions from SecTalks Canberra. You'll need some Google skills, knowledge about social media, and some clever thinking to answer some of these questions. Thanks for putting this together!
Link: https://tryhackme.com/jr/cbrosintctf
Site: Hadzy
Ritu Gill shared a new website that is able to load YouTube comments, let you search through them, shows statistics on them and even features a word cloud for some basic sentiment. The tool Hadzy seems to be a really useful and very easy to use tool to quickly find what you need within the world of YouTube videos.
Link: https://hadzy.com/
Have a good week and have a good search!
