In this blog I’ve often tried to emphasise how important it is to grasp the basic principles of investigation and learn how to apply the right method to a problem instead of just relying on a few tools to do the job. There are many reasons for this but the main reason is that almost …
One Search To Rule Them All – Boolean Searches For Images Read More »
This Sunday we were treated to an extra Quiztime image location challenge which involved an unidentified military vehicle. Doxsor posted this image and asked where this military vehicle was headed to, and which barracks was closest to the location: This was a good opportunity to practise military vehicle identification and explore how military units …
Quiztime 25th August 2019 – Military Vehicles & Geolocation Read More »
Holidays and work commitments mean that I haven’t had much time to tackle the daily Quiztime challenges recently, but participants in two of this week’s challenges from Sector035 and Fiete Stegers highlighted a couple of different approaches to photo geolocation that I wanted to write about in this blogpost. The two photos were very different …
“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Sherlock Holmes I’m not usually a big fan of Sherlock Holmes. Like many other fictional detectives, I don’t think he’s a particularly effective investigator. Holmes, Columbo, Morse, and countless others usually rely on evidence that is highly circumstantial and …
Quiztime 16th July – Start Big, Get Small – How To Be An OSINT Sherlock Read More »
Rescue boats are a common theme in this week’s Quiztime. On Tuesday Lars Wienand asked us to locate a rescue boat and today Philipp Dudek asks another Lifeboat related question. This was quite a fun quiz to solve but after solving it once I realised there was another solution which I think would allow you …
Quiztime 5th July – Lifeboats and Fast Reverse Image Searching Read More »
When I was a child I spent a lot of time living around various military establishments in Germany. In the 1980s the north German plain was packed with NATO soldiers ready to fight the Russians in case they ever rolled over the East German border (remember when that was a thing?). Nowadays the Russians prefer …
Quiztime 28th June 2019 – Planespotting On The Heide Read More »
In the short time that I have been blogging, many of the OSINT tools I’ve referred to have already become obsolete or no longer exist. Facebook removed Graph Search, Twitter removed geotagged Tweets, IntelTechniques lost its tools, and Pipl went behind a paywall. Although these setbacks can be frustrating, it’s important to remember that the …
It’s been a busy time and I didn’t get much chance to do the daily Quiztime challenge last week, but I did really enjoy the most recent quiz posted by Tilman Wagner. It was the first video based Quiztime I’ve attempted and as always I learned some new things along the way. Here’s the film …
Quiztime 5th June 2019 – Movies, CGI, and Trainspotting Read More »
With any kind of OSINT investigation it’s easy to gather huge amounts of data in a very short amount of time, but what do you do with it all? There are thousands of tools you can use to scrape information from all kinds of sources, but how do you decide to prioritise it? What information …
Using Gap Analysis To Keep OSINT Investigations On Track Read More »
Today’s Quiztime challenge was from Sector035. It’s a straightforward geolocation question – or at least the type of question is straightforward, the solution was certainly not. Incidentally you should check out Sector035’s blog for great weekly OSINT resource updates. The challenge was to identify the location where this photo was taken: It’s not immediately …
Quiztime – 9th May 2019 – The French Prison System Read More »