Week in OSINT #2019–34

Battling tanks, breached translations and a better Telegago!

Published in

Week in OSINT

3 min readAug 26, 2019

And here we are, another Week in OSINT ready. Not so ridiculously long as last week, but I hope it’s still a nice read. Enjoy and have a great week!

Venmo
Telegago
fSpy
Translation Breaches
Instagram’s Multiple Locationsx
The Battle of Ilovaisk

Media: Venmo

Justin Pakacios tagged me last week on Twitter, alerting me about a video from the Layer8 conference. This talk by mportatoes and Shad0wRec0n goes about their tool Venemy, an intelligence tool for the payment tool Venmo.

Watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/sce9a-mD9a8

Site: Telegago

Last week Eva Prokofiev alerted me to an update of Telegago. If you don’t know the tool, it is a Google search engine targeting Telegram. This has always been a really good source and it just got better!

Link: https://cse.google.com/cse?q=+&cx=006368593537057042503:efxu7xprihg

Tool: fSpy

Last week I was tagged by Serge Courrier in a thread on Twitter about calculating angles for 3D shadow analysis. There are some options already, like the way Forensic Architecture has used Blender before to recreate a scene in 3D to find the exact time and day of a specific shadow. And then, Serge stumbled upon software that can be used to calculate the focal length of a camera!

Using an old Quiztime photo to find the aperture

Now we just have to find some time to play with this, to go over the source code and see whether it is possible to add extra tooling to plot extra lines at certain depths and a circle or other measurement lines on the surface, so we can use that to calculate the length of a shadow in a full 3D world… 🤔

Link: https://fspy.io/

GitHub: https://github.com/stuffmatic/fSpy

Article: Translation Breaches

AccessOSINT wrote an article about how he found a website offering translation services, but also have Google index the translation results. And that gives some very interesting results, going over the previous data.

Link: https://medium.com/@osint/translation-finding-data-within-indexed-translations-49c0e1a0c1d6

Tip: Instagram’s Multiple Locations

D Nemec has been busy for a while, going over Instagram and trying to find out useful information within. This little Twitter thread is about how Instagram has usually more than one page or ID for a certain location, and how you can use that information to get the most out of your searches.

Link: https://twitter.com/djnemec/status/1165150682539864064

Media: The Battle of Ilovaisk

Forensic Architecture published a new video about how they used machine learning algorithms to analyse images and videos to find the involvement of Russian military equipment in eastern Ukraine. Besides this one, I must say that all the videos on the website of Forensic Architecture are always worth watching, since they use cutting edge technology in their investigations.