Week in OSINT #2018–34
This week I invited a guest author to share sites and tools in the domain of social media and online accounts in general.
Last week I started contacting people with the question whether they would like to be a guest author for Week in OSINT. One of the first ones to respond within a matter of hours was AccessOSINT with a long list of nice links! He is also the one who created level 15 on sourcing.games together with Jan Tegze, a level aimed to please the OSINT enthusiasts out there. I have to admit I only added about half of the links he sent me in this week’s newsletter, where I tried to focus on social media and online accounts in general. But to be honest, I could easily have filled a second edition with all the links I received!
This week’s Overview:
- VSCO
- Followerwonk
- Search is Back!
- Snapchat Map
- Reddit Investigator
- Skype Avatars
- Locate Family
- Pipl API
- Amazon Wishlists
- Find my Past
- Tracelabs
Website: VSCO
This is literally just a social media, but at least for me, it was a more unknown one before a week or two ago. A person we were searching for was on here, but it wasn’t indexed on search engines, so just searching on the site was key. This is probably something to be aware of on all social media sites, to search directly and not just rely on search engines.
Link: https://vsco.co/
Website: Followerwonk
Followerwonk will let you search for Twitter users using more advanced searches. You can for instance search within bio’s, the URL spot, location, and general account name as well. If you were searching for the owner of a website, you can search the website in the URL box to search for accounts which have that there to find owners and people involved in them. So if you were searching for a common name, this could help narrow down results.
Website: Search is Back!
This is used for searching Facebook users. You can enter a name and then others like a location to narrow down your results. You can also search for a person who likes a certain page so if you know their interests, this could help.
Website: Snapchat Map
The Snapchat map which can be accessed from the website. You can view all public Snapchats from any area in the world and also you can download those videos which is a great feature if you wanted to collect videos from a certain place.
Website: Reddit Investigator
Enter a Reddit name and get statistics about the account. It will also analyze their posts and try to deduce things like what sports teams they support and more.
Website: Skype Avatars
If you change {USERNAME} in the URL to a proper Skype username, it will show you their profile picture. This then allows you to easily reverse image search it.
Note from Sector035: I have not been able to retrieve all avatars, but I have yet to find the reason for this.
Website: Locate Family
This is an incredible website for searching people on from all different countries. It has names, phone numbers, and addresses of people from tons of countries like America to Slovenia.
Website: Pipl API
Everyone knows Pipl, but many don’t know about the API. You can use this API Demo for free anytime, and it will show so much more info. The normal site may show an age, but the API will usually then show full DOB. Also, while it doesn’t show emails on it, the API does show real MD5 hashes for what their email is, so if you generate a list of possible emails, convert them to MD5, search it to see if you got the right one.
Website: Amazon Wishlists
You can search a name or email address on here to see if the person has an open wishlist that you can view to see items they want and are interested in. This is for America, you can change .com to .co.uk for UK and so on.
Website: Find My Past
Birth records for England and Wales from 1837 to 2006 which is amazing. Using this, you can find anyone’s full name including middle name, birth year, mothers maiden name and location they were born.
Link: https://search.findmypast.co.uk/search-world-Records/england-and-wales-births-1837-2006/
Website: Tracelabs
TraceLabs is a non-profit organisation that works to find open source intelligence on real missing persons to help the police and families find these people. Anyone can register to help, learn, and meet other great people who want the same thing. We also do a lot of OSINT CTF’s now where winners can get some really great prizes which are well worth winning.
Link: https://tracelabs.org/
As stated in the beginning, all the links and the accompanying text were provided by AccessOSINT, so a really big thank you from my side. Don’t forget to follow him on Twitter!
And if you think you have a nice set of links in one specific area of expertise, feel free to contact me!
Have a good week and have a good search
