Social Media Intelligence: A Guide
Social Media Intelligence or SOCMINT is a subset of OSINT that primarily focuses on techniques that allow Investigators to monitor Social Media such as Facebook. It opens up numerous attack surfaces of Investigators as it holds targets personal information in public view. The key difference between SOCMINT and OSINT is that the SOCMINT can be deployed on content that is Private or Public. The use of SOCMINT is an intrusion into people’s privacy and therefore must comply with the international principles of legality, necessity, and proportionality.
The information analyzed by SOCMINT could be classified into four categories:
- The information obtained through sources that could not identify the target like data about locations or public transport.
- Information that could identify a person — such as a name, gender, age, nationality.
- The information which is specifically accessed through covert tactics
- Closed information accessed using clandestine tactics
There are different types of Social Media for different data sets. The types of Social Media are:
- Social Networking Sites like LinkedIn or Facebook
- Microblogs like Twitter or Weibo
- Image Socials like Flickr or Instagram
- Video-Sharing like Youtube
- Blogs like Blogger
- Forums like Reddit
- Gaming Socials like Raptr, Onverse, Steam or Discord
- Social Bookmarking like Pinterest or Tumblr
Looking into Facebook
Facebook is by far the most popular social media site with over 2.7 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2020. Unfortunately, they have removed the advanced searching ability off its platform as of Mid 2019. Using a standard Facebook search is quite easy and it provides you with various filters to aid you in your investigation. You’ll just require the target’s name or an alias. There is also another way of using Intelx’s Facebook graph search tool. You can find Facebook Ids using their services. If you’re looking to scrape data of their friend list to visualize data you can use mbasic.facebook.com.
Looking at Twitter
Unlike Facebook, Twitter allows for advanced search methods. These standard operators allow for a deep and thorough search on the platform. Likewise, you can also use Intelx’s Twitter search tool. You can also scrape the target’s followers and graph them through data visualization tools.
Looking into Gaming Socials
Not a lot talked about but if your target is someone who plays video games they would have accounts on different Gaming Forums depending on what game they played and what is the online handle they go by. One such example could be someone’s Xbox account which has links to their Twitter and Facebook or World Of Warcraft forums account linked to their SnapChat or Facebook if the target is a WoW player. Given below is Hatless1der’s Gaming Sites Sheet.
Tracking Users on Multiple different socials
Let’s face it, so many social media sites! How can we track the target through multiple sites? Well, initially we could use Advanced Google search to find the sites where the account is present but that can become tedious so we can check specific usernames to see where they are being used through search services, such as:
- https://namechk.com/
- https://www.whatsmyname.app/
- https://checkusernames.com/
- https://www.namecheckr.com/
- https://sherlock-project.github.io/
Summary
People tend to use socials a lot these days and it’s rare to see someone without it. They will post content like images, videos, messages, and even geo location data. They also mention their education history, their current workplace, and addresses. Though Social Media sites allow users to control their privacy, very few users do that. This makes data readily available for accessing for investigations. The upcoming blogs will contain more insights on other various aspects of OSINT . Till then happy hacking :) .
