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…
Tag: resources
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…
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…
Website Forensics: How To Detect Editorial Changes
A few months ago I wrote about how you could use Carbon-14 to detect the timestamps for images published in webpages. By comparing the publication times of the images with the publication time of the page itself it is possible…
OSINT Techniques: Who’s Behind A WordPress Site?
WordPress is the base that 35% of the world’s websites are built on. If you’re ever going to investigate a website, then it’s really important to be able to know your way around a WordPress setup. In this tutorial I’m…
Crypto Scam Investigation: Using Spiderfoot HX For OSINT Automation
Automation or Augmentation? Automation is an increasingly important part of OSINT. Even the simplest of investigations can require large amounts of different data types to be gathered and analysed quickly. Yet it is not accurate to suggest that all…
Using Spiderfoot HX To Investigate A Malicious IP Address
Using OSINT to identify and investigate sources of malicious internet activity is a key part of cyber security. There’s a huge range of open source information out there to help with this, and Spiderfoot HX gathers it very quickly. This…
Using FFMPEG To Grab Stills and Audio For OSINT
Many internet investigations feature video at some point. Being able to capture and analyse video content is an important skill, particularly if your task involves identifying people or places. You can always pause a video to try and view the…
Carbon-14: Verifying The Age of A Website
Carbon14 is a really useful Python tool for website investigations and verification. It allows investigators to work out when a webpage was created, and if it has potentially been altered since it was first published. Carbon14 checks the data attached…
Search Tip: Finding Historic WhoIs Data
The WhoIs system used to be a goldmine for OSINT investigators. It was usually possible to find out the address, phone number, and e-mail address of the person who owned or at least registered the website. However the increasing use…