In last week’s Wednesday Quiz Tilman Wagner posted this photo and asked us several questions about it: 1) Who posted it and where? 2) What was the occasion? 3) Did Tilman participate, and if so, how? So where to start? We need to know the location before we can answer any of Tilman’s questions. There …
Quiztime: How To Clean Pictures For Better Search Results Read More »
What’s the most boring part of Open Source Intelligence? Most OSINT practitioners (including me) usually enjoy the research phase of an assignment the most. Collecting data and finding new lines of enquiry is fun, but writing it all up at the end is usually dull. Well-written reports are a vital part of the OSINT process, …
If you’ve been interested in geolocation for any length of time, you’ll already be familiar with some of the most common tools that researchers make use of: Google Maps & Street View, Google Earth, reverse image search tools, Suncalc, and so on. There are many lesser-known tools that are also useful and can help to …
I was kindly invited to the Layer 8 Podcast to talk about my career in OSINT, the skills that make a good OSINT investigator, why I love Quiztime so much, teaching SANS SEC 487 Open Source Intelligence, and what we do at The OSINT Curious Project. You can listen to the podcast here.
In this video Technisette and I joined David Bombal to demonstrate some different geolocation techniques. We covered quite a few topics including: EXIF Data Using terrain features to find locations with Google Earth Removing unwanted parts of an image to do better reverse image searches Cropping and reverse searching images with Bing and Google Lens …
Wondering how to start out in OSINT? In this video Micah Hoffman, Technisette and I joined David Bombal to discuss some basic OSINT techniques and share examples and stories of our OSINT experiences.
Being able to prove exactly when data was posted to the internet is a core skill for internet investigators. If you want to be able to prove when a video was first uploaded, when an account was created, or when an editorial change was made to a website, then you need to be able to …
Investigators are often faced with an overwhelming amount of data. In these situations finding an exact person, time, or place among all the noise can be very difficult. This problem is not limited to geo- or chronolocation challenges like those published by Quiztime either. Fortunately this is not a new problem and there are tried …
The Process of Elimination – Quiztime Jan 14th 2022 Read More »
Sometimes the way to solve a geolocation challenge is obvious. Other times less so. The Quiztime challenge that Fiete Stegers set on 8th October was certainly in the latter category and was probably the hardest Quiztime I’ve attempted so far. This is quite a lengthy write-up, so click to skip ahead to sections of interest. …
Geolocating images can be difficult. Sometimes the way to identify a location is not immediately obvious, but you can start with what you do know and then close the gaps to find out things that you don’t know and gradually get closer to your objective. For example you might be fairly sure about the country …