Dark Side 116: Sock Puppets
What if I told you not all fake social media accounts are used maliciously?
When you hear the term sock puppet, the majority of people probably think of something like this:
While I would love to talk about DIY sock puppets, that’s not the type of sock puppet we’ll be discussing today.
In the world of tech and all things security, Sock Puppets are actually social media accounts created for the purpose of protecting one’s identity. I’ll dive into that a bit deeper as we go.
Up until a few months ago, I had never heard of this phenomenon and when hearing the term sock puppets, I had no idea what they were. Out of curiosity, I asked a few current and past colleagues if they knew what sock puppets were and they all responded that they didn’t. With that, I decided this would be a great topic to tackle, especially for individuals like me, wanting to get more involved in OSINT (Open Source Intelligence).
As some of you may know, I recently joined the Trace Labs Slack community with the end goal of taking part in their efforts to use OSINT and ethical hacking to aid in missing person cases. This Slack community is where I first stumbled upon the term, along with so much other valuable information.
