Recently I’ve been setting up a web application built with Docker. The setup posed a little challenge since it was necessary to run the app on the internet but at the same time I didn’t want it to be directly accessible on the web for anyone to poke around. It’s possible to limit access to …
Discovering email addresses or user names is an important part of OSINT work. In this short article I’ll look at three methods for gathering information about Gmail users. How To Tell If An Organisation Uses Gmail The growth of GSuite (now better known as Google Workspace) for cloud based productivity means that organisations can link …
Being able to discover subdomains is an essential part of researching an organisation. Behind a company’s main domain there are many other subdomains that can provide useful information about an organisation’s structure, technology, and business practices. Subdomain discovery is a foundational skill for security researchers, but it is a very useful tool to add to …
In the last post we looked at the basic building blocks of the Open Street Map (OSM) database. Objects in the database are made up of single nodes, ways (which are a series of single nodes joined together), and relations (which are more complex structures where ways and nodes are combined). Tags are used to …
The Open Street Map database contains detailed information about almost every square metre of the surface of the planet. Land use, building types, rivers, park benches, pubs, streets and millions of other data points are all mapped out and documented in detail. You might be familiar with the browser-based Open Street Map (OSM) website. Superficially …
Why are all these people parking their cars at a swimming pool in the middle of lockdown? This was the question Lars Wienand posted for yesterday’s Quiztime challenge. Here’s the photo: To solve this quiz we need to do two things. First we need to know where this is, and secondly we need to know …
One of the biggest challenges of internet investigation is preserving data once you’ve found it. We have access to more information than ever before, but so much of it can be easily lost if we don’t take steps to archive it. If you’ve ever bookmarked an important resource only to come back later and see …
There’s a huge difference between countries when it comes to using publicly available records for OSINT. If you’re researching a subject in the USA there’s a wealth of available information. In the EU it’s almost the opposite and it can be very difficult to find any public data at all. The UK is much more …
I have a love/hate relationship with WordPress. It’s the world’s most popular CMS and it makes managing websites very easy. The downside of this widespread popularity is that there is sometimes far too much technical support for WordPress out there. Wading through all the incorrect advice, adverts for more dumpster fires plugins disguised as tech …
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 was helpful for me to transfer habits and methodologies from traditional investigation to the subject …
Extract, Research, Verify: Quiztime 6th October 2020. Read More »