Week in OSINT #2019–14
Fakes and facts, TOR and torrents, updates and utopia
When I started this OSINT newsletter almost a year ago I didn’t think it would be so easy to find new content. And even though I wanted to take it a bit more easy this year, it seems the news letter is getting longer instead of shorter. Besides that, I still send them out every week and still love doing it! So keep posting those nice articles and links, because Week in OSINT ain’t going anywhere any time soon as long as there’s enough time!
Off to the overview of this week:
- CSE Utopia
- Tor66
- Torrent Downloads
- Old Aerial Photograpy
- Deep Fakes
- Fact Checking
- Strava
- GitHub — Updated Tools
Links: CSE Utopia
This link clearly says what it is: One huge collection of Google Custom Search Engines! You need a specific CSE? It is probably listed in here. The only problem with such collections is that there is no way to see what query was used to create it, but if you are only looking for information and don’t care how you get there, this is a great resource. Thanks for the share OsintStash!
Site: Tor66
Are you having problems with the availability of fresh onions? Or do you have to resort to pages on the 'surface web' to browse for market places on the dark web? Then do pay the link that Lorenzo Romani shared on Twitter last week a visit. It’s fast, looks comprehensive and has screenshots for most sites.
Site: Torrent Downloads
Francesco Poldi shared an interesting link last week. This site you can give you an overview of torrents that are downloaded by a specific IP address. After more than 40 episodes of Week in OSINT I can finally say: “And now for something completely different!”
Archive: Old Aerial Photography
The wizard of geolocation Obretix shared a few wonderful links the other week. The first link contains aerial photographs of Aleppo from 1959 and the second one Mosul from 1958. In a response Peter Bucci also gave a link to more imagery from 1968 to 1970. Amazing quality and great for historical purposes.
More Middle East: https://corona.cast.uark.edu/atlas
Article: Deep Fakes
It may be an older article, but “deep fake” is getting a lot of attention recently. Besides it being one of the topics at IJF19 last weekend, it poses a real challenge with news spreading so fast on social media. This is indeed an interesting read, as Dutch Osint Guy wrote in his tweet. And also is part 2!
Part 1: https://blog.witness.org/2018/07/deepfakes/
Part 2: https://blog.witness.org/2018/07/deepfakes-and-solutions/
Article: Fact Checking
Julia Bayer shared a very interesting article the other week, written by the fact checking team at Agence France-Presse. It gives a lot of tips for journalists and people that deal with verification or investigation of events and news. The rest of the site is a collection of fact checked stories and explanation why stories are marked as fake or false.
Links: Instagram
Another list with Instagram tools, and again we see a lot of the same links pop-up as I have mentioned over and over again. But on closer inspection, there are some very interesting new ones!
The first one I noticed was searchmybio that gives you a tool to search within Instagram biographies. The second one is inst4gram, a website that lets you search for a topic and retrieves a nice overview of tags and accounts.
I tested the other ones too, but some didn’t do anything new (like ‘tofo’) or were swarmed with adds, banners or weird links (like for instance ‘web.stagram.com’ and ‘insta-stalker.com’). So if you want to click on them, be my guest. But I refuse to give them some kind of stamp of approval 😎
Site: Strava
Yes, this one had to be included in this episode of WiO. I stumbled upon it last week while making a presentation for an upcoming talk and if you love Strava, you will love this site! You can search, filter and ogle the map with segments. No account needed, unless of course you want to dive a bit deeper into the depths of the Strava info.
GitHub: Updated Tools
Time to have a quick look at the tools on GitHub. A lot of tools that were mentioned before in Week in OSINT are updated in the last week or two. Instead of going over each tool again, here’s a short overview of the most important ones:
https://github.com/jivoi/awesome-osint
https://github.com/lockfale/OSINT-Framework
https://github.com/laramies/theHarvester
And that is it for this week!
Have a good week and have a good search!
