Week in OSINT #2019–19
A new week, a new set of links! From tips and tutorials, to a nice new search engine!
It is already time again for the weekly overview of everything that I found in my timeline, or that were sent to me. I can say that even after a year of writing this news letter it is incredibly easy to come up with new content. Even if the week seems somewhat slow in terms of OSINT based content, there are constantly people writing articles, tweeting or crafting new tools for me to find on GitHub. Anyway, off to this weeks list of topics:
- Forensic Architecture
- DarkSearch
- HostHunter
- OpenFacto
- Find Info on Anyone
- Maderas’ Moments
- Facial Recognition
- Satellite Imagery Sources
Site: Forensic Architecture
Most of the readers of this news letter must have heard about them, but in case you haven’t, Forensic Architecture is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. They undertake investigations into human right violations and use cutting edge technology for that. The most impressive part of their work is that they recreate scenes in 4D to visualise the locations of people and objects in time and space. Visit their new website and spend some time watching the reconstructions and investigations they conducted.
Search: Darksearch
Last Saturday I was tagged by CapteursO on Twitter which doesn’t happen that often. It usually means one of two things: That she needs help, or she has something awesome to share. It was the latter.
DarkSearch.io is a recent project that claims to have over 30.000 pages of the dark web indexed. It is completely free to use, has fresh content and best of all for all us nerds out there, it has an API! No need to create an account, just query that endpoint and that’s it! Version 2 will be even better, that is planned for release soon. It will have some really cool features, but you can read all about that all in their Medium blog.
Tool: HostHunter
Last week this tweet popped up in my Tweetdeck column with the #OSINT filter. Pavel Sitnikov shared the tool HostHunter by superhedgy, a simpel and very effective tool. Have a bunch of IP addresses, feed it to the Python script and it goes off to identify host names, OS types and other basic information, together with a screenshot of the target.
Site: OpenFacto (Fr)
OpenFacto is a French research organisation that conducts open source investigations. It’s members are three awesome people that I have had the pleasure of working with on several occasions: hpiedcoq, CapteursO and yaolri. If you understand French, or are comfortable with using Google Translate, do check out their website and articles!
Link: https://openfacto.fr
Article: Find Info on Anyone
Get used to it Katarzyna, you’ll keep on learning! And with me having an OSINT targeted newsletter, it is even more true! Or as someone once explained it to me: “It’s like drinking from the fire hose”. What she shared is one lengthy blog on Medium by Petro Cherkasets about OSINT on people. It takes you along the different steps with the help of the useful diagrams of Michael Bazzell and gives some good hints on tools and sites you can use.
Link: https://medium.com/@Peter_UXer/osint-how-to-find-information-on-anyone-5029a3c7fd56
Tip: Maderas’ Moments
HackerMaderas has collected all his tweets and created two ‘moments’, where I am going to point you to the one with OSINT related tweets. Grab a coffee, read some of his (really good) tips. Learn how an ethical hacker or RedTeamer looks at your network, because there is more to OSINT than just social media.
Tool: Facial Recognition
While spending my weekly moment on GitHub, trying to find interesting tools, I stumbled on a golden oldie, that was recently updated. The tool is simply called ‘face recognition’ and it does exactly what it says. Yes, the tool can be used to automatically apply filters to a photo, but the cool part is: It can bulk extract faces from a bunch of photos! Now how cool is that for you OSINT peeps?
Article: Satellite Imagery Sources
In my newsletter of week 36 in 2018 I mentioned a document with all kinds of satellite imagery sources. This time I have an article by GIS Geography, going over loads of free satellite imagery providers. Some need registration or only have a preview, others are completely free and provide high resolution imagery. But there is enough to go over, whether you need environmental information or high resolution imagery.
Link: https://gisgeography.com/free-satellite-imagery-data-list/
Bonus: FUNINT
We’ve almost reached the end, so I’ll just leave you with this last link. A nice collection of scraped screenshots by Shodan. Nice as a desktop wallpaper maybe?
Have a good week and have a good search!
