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 …
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 …
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 »
Over the weekend my site suffered from a spike in traffic that caused the WordPress interface and then the rest of the site to grind to a halt. This blog runs on a VPS that has about the same computing power as a first generation Raspberry Pi and so it doesn’t take much to exhaust …
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 searches, captures EXIF data from images, takes screenshots, and saves lots of other useful data …
In OSINT we make use of the wealth of information that is now available to us, but so often it becomes the case that there is too much information for us to process effectively. It’s easy to drown in a sea of data and you can quickly find yourself with twenty browser tabs open having …
Using Gap Analysis For Smarter OSINT – Quiztime 4th March 2020 Read More »
The last blog post I wrote about Fake Twitter profiles is by far the most widely-read post I’ve ever published since I started this blog. It’s nice when people read your work but there was a little sour note with this post after it was pointed out to me that someone had been posting it …
Who Stole My Stuff? Finding Out Who Is Behind A Website Read More »
How can you become more accurate with photo geolocation? Finding a country is good, finding a town is better, finding a street in a town is better still – but is it possible to get even more accurate than that? It depends on the needs of your case, but if you want to geolocate and …
EDIT: As of this morning (22nd Feb) this dork no longer works. WhatsApp have modified their URLs so that they are no longer indexed by Google. The other dorks on this post still work though. A tweet by Jordan Wildon attracted a lot of interest this week after he showed how it was possible to …