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 …
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 …