The Golden Age of OSINT is over

Change is coming and it will greatly affect the way OSINT investigations are conducted in the future. Who knows, in a couple of years completely different skill sets might be needed to handle online investigations. Are we prepared?

In the OSINT community we constantly have to deal with changes. New tools and new platforms are always on the rise, just as old platforms and tools become obsolete in an instant. Staying updated is a continuous challenge, much more than just one person can handle. Luckily, most members of the OSINT community are willing to share any new discoveries, especially on Twitter. Therefore, following the hashtag #OSINT on Twitter, as well as numerous OSINT-related accounts, is the first and most important step when working in any area that requires OSINT skills.

There is always a lot of chatter on the future of OSINT and unlike many others, I do not think that Python is the future of OSINT. Does OSINT even have a future? Let us fast forward to the year 2022 and have a look at online investigations then.

January 2022:

Over the past years, more and more people have been made aware of their own data privacy and this has massively changed the way they use online services. What started with the release of the ‘Snowden documents’ in 2013 and continued with massive data breaches, such as the Cambridge Analytica case made public in 2018, has led to the desire to share less information publicly. This development basically made Facebook obsolete and new platforms have arisen in its place. Although Facebook still exists, the data it contains only has historic value and cannot be used for current investigations, much like Google+ or MySpace a couple of years back. Even though Facebook tried to turn the tide by changing privacy settings, the damage done by many the data breaches was too much to convince users to maintain a presence on the platform. Nowadays, social media is more anonymous than before, modern platforms do not require or request real names and information shared is not automatically distributed publicly. For OSINT investigations, this means that a real name might not provide a starting point to search for someone online. The main starting point is now an obscured username, which is hopefully unique enough to be used in investigations. How can we identify a username, if we just have a real name to start with?

In modern social media this is almost impossible. Unlike the old Facebook, which gave us a display name and an account name (mostly based on the real name), today’s social media does not reveal the real name. So, either you know the username to start with or you are pretty much screwed. Of course, another possibility is searching ‘historic’ sites that have linked usernames to real names, such as Facebook or maybe even Twitter. There are also commercial databases and people search engines that offer these services for a small fee. However, if someone was OPSEC-savvy before 2019, he or she most likely will not be found online easily in 2022. Even with a unique username, the information that can be obtained from social networks is marginal, since everyone is well aware of their own data privacy. If you are not a part of your targets network, you will not see anything. No updates, no pictures. Even likes and other forms of indirect communication between accounts will not be publicly disclosed. This rendered many of the Python tools developed over the past years obsolete, as the data that can be scraped is mostly useless.

With that said, how does OSINT look today? In general, we have shifted from the passive gathering of information to more active means of collecting data. I call it virtual HUMINT (VUMINT). The objective of VUMINT is to infiltrate target networks during investigations in order to see information that is not openly available and possibly even interact with the target on a ‘personal’ level. Whereas sock puppets in 2019 where mainly used to gain access to social networks in general, sock pockets nowadays are needed to gain access to specific profiles of our targets and their closed networks. Now, more than ever, it is important to have lifelike and tailor-made sock puppets to achieve this objective. A blog post from 2019 is still useful and gives a good description of sock puppets and how they should be setup: The OSINT Puppeteer. Building a sock puppet for a specific account is not something that is done in a short period time, so receiving results through VUMINT takes much longer than information gathering through passive OSINT. Naturally, there is no guarantee that a target will add you to his or her network, no matter how good the sock puppet is. This means you might invest a lot of time in the creation of a sock puppet without achieving any notable results. In certain ways, it is very similar to a target-centric phishing campaign.

Another challenge in modern OSINT is the vast dissemination of unverified or untrue information on the internet. Everyone can post everything online in an instant and everyone wants to have news in a heartbeat, making it harder for press and media to thoroughly research events before releasing information. Media and press institutes that fact-check and verify first are losing the battle against quick-releasing competitors. The customer’s demand for instant information over reliable information has flooded the internet with rumors and ‘fake news’. During investigations, more and more time is spent conducting OSINT research on the credibility of data found on specific targets. Finding the original source of the information, the so-called Patient Zero, assessing its trustworthiness and then determining how and if the information can be used in our investigations. Today, it is not the actual collection of open source data that is the key, but the actual evaluation of this material.

One thing that has not changed, is the fact that the global corporations behind online platforms, and thus intelligence services, still have the possibility to use all the personal data on users however they desire. While OSINT collection and intelligence has become more challenging for everyone outside of these corporations and intelligence services, it is easier than ever for them to make use of personal data. Whether it is tailor-made advertising or extensive profiling through intelligence services, our data and of course ourselves are now more transparent than ever. There is no hiding from global corporations or intelligence services anymore if we want to use online services. Luckily (or unfortunately), the personal data is not sold or leaked as much as it was a couple years ago, limiting the benefit of commercial databases.

In 2022, the Golden Age of OSINT in investigations is over. The trends that started around 2015, e.g. automating OSINT, do not work anymore. Instead of learning how to code, maybe we should focus on social engineering a bit more. A good OSINT investigator in 2022, first and foremost, needs to be a good intelligence analyst and have some strong Human Intelligence skills.

Thank goodness it’s still 2019!

MW-OSINT / 04.01.2019