Ever since I started blogging about image geolocation I’ve tried to write about methods and techniques that make solving these kind of puzzles more structured and systematic. In my professional career I was (until recently) a criminal investigator so it…
DNS Records, QAnon, and How To Handle Uncertainty In OSINT.
Twitter would not be Twitter without a daily dose of QAnon drama. Recently there were claims that since Q-drop archive site qmap.pub now shares the same IP as 8Kun proved that 8Kun owner Jim Watkins is Q. I’m not sure…
Website OSINT: What’s The Link Between Antifa.com and Russia?
The term “OSINT” sometimes gets thrown around a little too loosely. The “open source” part of OSINT is straightfoward enough: there’s a world of information out there and with enough digging and practice you can find almost anything you could…
Geolocating Mobile Phones With An IP
This article was written jointly with Matthias Wilson (@MWOSINT). It is also published on his own site here. IP addresses feature prominently in digital investigations, but how useful are they for geolocation? The truth is that while IP addresses have…
Planes & Trains – Quiztime 24th June 2020
During lockdown I’ve spent a lot of my evenings trying to improve my coding and data science skills with Datacamp. As I’ve tried to apply my new found knowledge to real world projects I’ve come to learn that about 80%…
Protecting WordPress From XMLRPC Attacks
Over the weekend my site suffered from a spike in traffic that caused the WordPress interface and then the rest of the site to grind to a halt. This blog runs on a VPS that has about the same computing…
Using Hunchly With Elasticsearch and Kibana
Hunchly is an excellent OSINT tool designed to capture and record your browser activity as you go. Once activated it sits quietly in the background as you browse and saves copies of webpages as you view them. It also records…
Lost In The Woods & Translation Troubles – Quiztime 10th March 2020
I started writing up this Quiztime post almost two months ago but then life got very busy and I never managed to finish it. This was a really fun quiz by Lars Wienand and the solution was not as obvious…
Chronolocation Clues – Quiztime 11th May 2020
Not all image-based OSINT work is about geolocation. It is always helpful to know where a photo was taken, but knowing when an image was taken can be just as important when trying to verify it. Is this a COVID-hit…
The Secret Life Of JPEGs
Using photographs for OSINT purposes is not new but almost all work of this kind mostly focuses on the visual content of images. Much less well known is the usefulness of image meta- and file data for research purposes. Beyond…