Unravelling the Norton Scam – Chapter 5

Never be too careless with what you post on social media. It might come back to haunt you one day and in the case of our investigations it sure led to some key findings on the scam network!

Chapter 1 – It all starts with a bad sock puppet

Chapter 2 – The Art of OSINT

Chapter 3 – What’s the big deal? And who’s to blame?

Chapter 4 – The more, the better

Chapter 5 – Mistakes on social media

The ultimate goal of our investigation was to find the people behind the scam. So far, we had found fake personas and most of the WHOIS data was misleading as well. Of all the people we came across, there was still a reasonable amount of doubt that they were actually involved in the scam, or we couldn’t reveal their true identities for sure. In our hunt for the truth we also turned to social media, hoping to find someone connected to our case.

As previously mentioned, most names used to register websites were clearly fake. Nancy Wilson and Steve Dalton were among the favorites. However, we did notice that the majority of sites had Indian addresses in the WHOIS data. In particular, two addresses reoccurred often: one in Noida and one in Gurgaon (also known as Gurugram). We decided to find Facebook profiles that had visited both cities and that were also linked to East Peoria, the city in Illinois that the scammers posted on their websites. Maybe someone was careless enough and had checked into all three places. Of course, this was done a while back when the Facebook graph search was still working.

Jackpot! While we hadn’t expected to find anything on this wild query, one Facebook profile matched our search. This person, named Baljeet, was a very active social media user and constantly checked into places on Facebook. Among these check-ins were Noida, Gurgaon and East Peoria.

Intelligence collection always feeds on mistakes your adversaries or intelligence targets make, and Baljeet committed a major blunder here. Soon after, we found ourselves digging into Baljeet’s profile. It turns out, that he had frequently visited locations (marked in blue) in the vicinity of the office building (marked in red) which was found in the WHOIS data of the scam sites and in which we suspected the team of developers behind these sites to be located.

At the same time, we discovered that Baljeet registered a website with his full name and actual email address, which we had found in his Twitter timeline. This website was providing web design services to customers in the US. And guess what? The site was using the same address in East Peoria and also the same phone number as the scam sites! I decided to have a little chat with Baljeet on Facebook to confront him with this information.

The conversation went on for a while and Baljeet kept coming up with excuses and dodgy information on why his website was using the same address and phone number as the scam sites. After our talks, he actually took down both for a while, but the address is back on the website today. To us it is clear: Baljeet is definitely involved in this scam. You don’t just sit in India and coincidently use the same address (in the middle of nowhere) and phone number as multiple scam sites on your own site. You don’t just coincidently happen to work in vicinity of addresses we have attributed to the scam sites.

While looking into other social media profiles used by Baljeet, we came across other indicators that fit the overall picture. A couple days ago, he proudly posted the following on Twitter: A certificate of an advanced Google Analytics course (my browser was set to German when I opened the link).

As you can see, the information we won from social media research led to us a prime suspect in our case. Not only did we have a real name now, we also had a unique username, a pattern of life and enough information to verify his involvement in our scam.

Our social media research also led to many more key findings. One of the phone numbers we found in the scam sites’ WHOIS data was also posting job advertisements on Facebook.

A call center agent providing support to activate Norton? That’s exactly how our hunt started. Looks like it is all coming together! The information we gathered throughout our social media research was invaluable and had us dig even deeper into WHOIS data and source code from the scam websites, leading to unravelling the whole network behind it. But that is something for the coming chapters.

Sector035/MW-OSINT – 15.08.2019

Unravelling the Norton Scam – Chapter 4

What are backlinks and how are they used in the Norton scam? Our OSINT investigations lead us into the world of SEO.

Chapter 1 – It all starts with a bad sock puppet

Chapter 2 – The Art of OSINT

Chapter 3 – What’s the big deal? And who’s to blame?

Chapter 4 – The more, the better

Our project started with a fake profile on Medium, which led us to several scam websites claiming to provide tech support. While the total number of these sites hasn’t risen much over the past months, entries promoting this scam on blogs, social media profiles and in comments on other websites have drastically risen. We see this as a crude search engine optimization (SEO) attempt.

Throughout the investigations we found individuals specializing in SEO, who where also likely linked to the network we were tracking. One of the sites that popped up in our search was yahoophonesupports(dot)com. Unlike previous fake sites that used Indian addresses and fake English-named personas, such as Nancy Wilson or Steven Dalton, this one was registered by someone named Jiya with a real looking email address. We had narrowed down our search to the city of Noida in India and the phone number used to register the site was definitely linked to our scam network. While most names used to register domains clearly came from fictitious peoples, maybe this was one was real.

Searching for the name on Google led to a result that fits the picture: Jiya from Noida offering SEO services.

Jiya mentions backlinks and blogger outreach, something we have seen in our scam as well. Let me explain the concept of backlinks, also known as inbound links. A backlink is a link on page A referring to page B. Most search engines interpret backlinks as votes on the popularity of a website. So, the more backlinks that lead to page B, the more popular this page seems and thus it will be rated higher in search results. The easiest way to create cheap backlinks is using free blogs, for example Medium. Googling the phone number used in this scam, we come up with over 1.000 Medium posts and sites, each also containing the link to one of the fake support sites, such as nortonhelpus(dot)com.

We are not only seeing this on Medium, but across many platforms. The amount of backlinks created clearly indicates that we are dealing with a large team of people, as this is probably not possible by one person or a small team alone. The number of search results for the phone number shown above has risen from 4,000 in May to about 21,000 this week and is still rising!

Of course, most posts come from obvious sock puppets, created with fake names and stolen profile pictures. Here’s Brad Pitt, alias James Rocky, offering tech support.

Once these sites are set up, clicking on the links can be automated, so that the target website (in this case all-emailsupport(dot)com) receives traffic, basically boosting its search index rating. The scam network is not expecting to generate any phone calls or support requests from these obviously fake Medium sites, these are just used in the SEO process for the actual scam site. We have been seeing these SEO-enablers on Twitter, Issuu and basically any platform that allows you to post information “quick and dirty”.

During our project we also looked at Google Trends, to figure out where the main targets of this scam were likely located. Obviously in the US, as the main tech support phone numbers were US toll-free numbers. However, we also noticed a British phone number. Google Trends allows you to look up search terms and see the interest over time and the region of interest for that specific search term. We were curious to see if any notable searches on one of the scam topics was googled in the UK often. We checked “activate Norton”, since this was one of the main services the scam network was allegedly offering: activating an expired Norton account.

Sure enough, the main regions that googled this term were the US and India. The US is obvious. This is the market the scammers are targeting. But why does India rank higher? One explanation could be testing the search term during the SEO-process. Coincidently, some of the peaks in the interest over time relate to time periods in which new fake sites were created. No notable searches were seen coming from the UK.

As mentioned before, most of the bogus blog posts were created really sloppy, as their sole purpose was to generate backlinks. We also found several sites linked to this scam that were apparently selling software. A lot of these sites were created using predefined templates, in some cases showing the shipping time or the general location on a map.

Apparently, the creator of this site had his location (likely based on a geolocation through Google) automatically added and didn’t bother to change it before putting the site online. In any case, he achieved his goal: A backlink to a scam site.

Now that we’ve learned how this scam uses SEO to promote their wrongdoings, is there anything that can be done to effectively tamper this scam network? How about Google, Bing, Yahoo and other major search engines take any site off their listing that features “+1-844-947-4746”.

Except ours, we’re the good guys!

Sector035/MW-OSINT – 11.08.2019

Unravelling the Norton Scam – Chapter 3

Not all information can be found using OSINT. Sometimes a little social engineering can be useful to verify data or provide new leads.

Chapter 1 – It all starts with a bad sock puppet

Chapter 2 – The Art of OSINT

Chapter 3 – What’s the big deal? And who’s to blame?

Previously, we warned you not to call a certain phone number linked to multiple scam sites. So, what exactly happens if you call +1-844-947-4746? Although it was obvious that the sites we were looking at and this phone number were involved in some kind of scam, I was curious to see what the exact business model was. Before making the call, I googled a bit and found out that the number was toll-free in the US. After topping one of my burner phones, I dialed the number.

It rang shortly and a gentleman with an Indian accent answered and asked which kind of assistance I required. I explained that I had problems with Norton 360. I couldn’t activate it. The gentleman wanted my name and my phone number, upon which I provided him with some bogus data. At first, he asked if I was able to install software, as he wanted to use Supremo to check my computer. Playing dumb, I just told him that I didn’t understand what he wanted me to do and that I have never personally installed anything on this computer. My son always did all the IT-stuff for me.

Next up, he mentioned two URLs that I should try to visit: helpme(dot)net and 1234computer(dot)com. It turns out that both sites were also meant to give him remote access to my computer.

remote access

This is where another important lesson in OSINT (and life) can be learned: Proper preparation prevents poor performance! I had not expected this and therefore hadn’t set up a clean Windows VM to play around with. Sadly, I had to find an excuse why I couldn’t access the URLs he had cited. I promised to call back, but never managed to get through again. From there on, the number only redirected me to voicemail. Funny enough, the mailbox mentions a typical American name as the owner. Maybe this could be useful in the future.

In any case, it was clear how the scam worked. Unsuspecting, non-tech-savvy users would call the hotline and give the scammers remote access to their computers. From there on, the possibilities to do harm are countless. Ever since then, I have always made sure to have a clean Windows VM that I can use in such cases.

Since we now had an idea what the scam was about, we decided to push forward with our investigations. Sector found a phone number associated with the site energeticsquad(dot)com. This site belonged to an IT-company named Energetic Squad LLC in Illinois, which coincidentally was also located at the address we had already seen on multiple scamming sites. The number found by Sector was an Indian mobile and I decided to get in touch with this person to find out if he or she was in any way related to the aforementioned website or any of the other scam sites. I noticed that it was registered in WhatsApp, so I decided to have a little chat. Of course, I used a burner phone for this; to be more precise, I was running WhatsApp in an Android VM on my computer.

What struck me here, is that I was indeed on the right track. I never said that the company was a LLC, yet it was immediately mentioned by the person I was texting with. By this, the owner of the Illinois company offering local tech-support was using an Indian phone number. He wasn’t keen on giving me his name, but his reactions showed that me that the name I had was also likely correct. At least he didn’t deny it.

name

I offered to buy his domain and we went back and forth regarding the price. I was pushing hard, something I usually wouldn’t do in a real case, and soon he asked if I could come to the US for further negotiations. I assume he was just trying to put me off track and distracting from the fact that he was actually located in India. His English also wasn’t what I would expect from a native speaker. Of course, I was able to travel to the US and at this point he decided to end the conversation.

whatsapp4

Being blocked by a scammer, because he accuses you of being a scammer. Now there’s a pot calling the kettle black! Of course, I burned bridges here and wasn’t able to reestablish contact after this. However, we did learn that the Indian mobile phone number was in fact connected to the website and the company. Also, we had likely found an actual name. Later on, we found out that the company Energetic Squad LLC had been registered in Illinois in the meantime, and that the name of their manager was the same name that is being used on the fake tech support voicemail. Everything and everyone is linked!

There were several other suspects which we had also contacted, and almost everyone acted as suspicious as the person I wanted to buy the domain from. In any case, these conversations gave us many new leads to follow up on and had us pivot toward social media profiles. Maybe these will provide some insight on the scam network (in the next chapter).

Sector035/MW-OSINT – 07.08.2019

Unravelling the Norton Scam – Chapter 2

Art is often considered the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. OSINT is art and sometimes OSINT produces art.

This is the second chapter of a series of short blog posts covering the investigation of a massive online scam network. If you are a new reader, I would advise you start with the first chapter to understand the context of this project.

The Art of OSINT

This is big! So far, we have collected information on hundreds of different entities; including websites, names, phone numbers, email addresses and much more. When we started, relevant data was just dumped into a text file. We also used Hunchly during our collection and then realized we needed to structure the most important data and moved on to a spreadsheet. This worked for a while, until we felt the need to display links between entities in an easy and understandable way. A more visual approach was chosen, and Sector started what I call “The Art of OSINT”: a link chart.

Sector used Maltego for our case, but there are many alternatives you can use as well. I have grown fond of draw.io and others might use one of the various mind mapping apps and platforms. The idea behind link analysis in general is to evaluate relations and connections between entities. Link charts are the visualization of this data, which in many cases make it easier for an analyst to discover connections. Sometimes the connections are not direct, but indirect, linking entities to each other by a third-party individual.

Let us take a look at how link charts can be built from scratch. In the first chapter of our series, I posted a screenshot of one of the scam sites.

On here I already have multiple pieces of information that I can connect. A name, a postal address, a phone number and lastly an email address. Each of these is the starting point for further OSINT investigtions. We found that the email address was used to register the domain allbagmanufacturing(dot)com. This domain also lists an Indian phone number in the WHOIS data.

phone number register.png

It turns out, that the Indian phone number was also used to register the site roadrunneremailsupports(dot)com.

all links.png

In conclusion, both sites are likely connected. However, how do we know that this phone isn’t just a burner phone or a random phone number? More OSINT research is required to verify if the phone number is existent and who it belongs to. I also mentioned a little social engineering coming up, didn’t I? If you were hoping to read about this topic in the second chapter of our journey, I have to disappoint you. Rest assured, we have a nice story on social engineering in one of the later chapters. Now, let’s get back to our link analysis.

One piece of information leads to another and soon we find new leads and many connections between the entities. The chart itself has grown quite a bit in the meantime. At first glance, it will seem a bit chaotic. However, it is still easier to handle than relaying this information in a text-based form. For me, link charts have an artistic character. Each chart, whether built manually or automated, is one of a kind. Unique data, unique arrangements, all coming together to form a piece of modern art.

Modern Art.jpg

Put this on a large canvas, have Sector sign it and it would be something that could be found in the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art. One day I plan to do exactly that. A vernissage on “The Art of OSINT”. Until then, let’s keep creating more masterpieces with our online investigations and link charts.

Sector035/MW-OSINT – 04.08.2019

Unravelling the Norton Scam – Chapter 1

If you have problems with Norton 360 or Norton Antivirus, please do not call +1-844-947-4746. You might end up with malware on your computer.

This is the start of a series of blog posts revolving around a massive scam network that targets individuals looking for tech-support regarding various software products. The scam mostly starts with fake Norton 360 and Norton Antivirus sites, however, has also been linked to fake Microsoft support sites and fake Facebook support sites (just to mention a few). We dug into this network, trying to identify the perpetrators behind it and used lots of different OSINT techniques over the course of several months. Every once in while a little social engineering came in handy, as we also contacted some of the suspected perpetrators directly. Our investigations are not over yet, there is still more to be found, but let us take you along this fascinating journey of online investigations.

Chapter 1 – It all starts with a bad sock puppet

Do you have a look at the accounts that connect with you on Twitter or Medium? I do, and so does my buddy Sector035. In late April 2019, a new person followed Sector’s blog on Medium and he had a look at this new follower.

A weird URL? A nice picture of a female named Pierre? This profile was begging for further research. The URL led to a tech-support site that listed the following phone number: +1-844-947-4746. Sector didn’t even wait to check this number on his computer and immediately googled it on his cell phone. I guess that’s what you call OSINT curious.

It turns out that this phone number was listed on numerous obviously fake sites and blog posts offering tech-support. Out of curiosity, we decided to take a closer look at some of the sites, in order to see how they were connected to each other and possibly find out who was responsible for creating them. At the time we had no idea how time consuming and big this project would be! Among the sites using the phone number, we initially concentrated on these four:

Each site looked worse than the other. Horrible design, bad English and next to the aforementioned phone number, they all used the same address:

While Sector started to check the WHOIS information using DomainBigData, GoDaddy and Whoxy, I looked into to Google Street View and did a little reverse image searching on the photos. It turns out that all the photos used were either stock pictures or stolen off other people’s social media profiles and the address itself was in an inconspicuous housing area. Googling the address led us to more suspicious sites, some of them using a different phone number. Among these was one belonging to a company allegedly called Energetics Squad LLC. No records existed for such a company in the State of Illinois, nor in any other state. Keep this company in mind, as it will show up in a later blog post as well!

The WHOIS check didn’t always provide the exact name of the registrant, but we found another similarity: most of the websites had been registered around March 13-14, 2019 in India.

Using DNSLytics, Sector also checked the Google Analytics ID and found that the sites were not only linked by all of what was described above, they also shared a common tracking code (UA-code). At this point, it was time to start linking the information in Maltego.

What started with a bad sock puppet, led to googling information and from there to a deep dive into domain data, Google Analytics research, as well as pulling corporate records from official state registries. The hunt was on and upon finding all this correlating data, we couldn’t just let go and decided to push forward.

Soon after, we started collecting information on an actual suspect and at a certain point engaged in an interesting conversation with this person. So, stay tuned for the next chapters of our fascinating journey!

Sector035/MW-OSINT – 31.07.2019

Вы понимаете? OSINT in Foreign Languages

It just takes one click in OSINT to land on a website in a foreign language. Investigations don’t have to stop here, if you have the right tools.

In today’s interconnected world, OSINT investigations lead us to foreign language content quite often. This does not mean we have to stop here. Thankfully, a broad variety of tools can support us in translating the content we find.

Before getting into specific tools, I have learned that you will receive the best results if you define the input language manually. Most tools can autodetect the input language, but if you’re working with short sentences or even single words, this might not function reliably. Sometimes translating very long sentences will also produce awkward results, splitting a long sentence into components could help in this case. That said, let’s have a look at some tools I use during my investigations.

First off, I would like to point out DeepL, a German company that trains AI to understand and translate texts. When it comes to translating content in German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian and Polish, DeepL has proven to be more accurate than other tools. You can copy and paste a text or upload a document to have it translated. I let the platform have a try at an excerpt from one of the older Keyfindings’ posts in German.

The next must-have is Google Translate. This extension should be installed in any browser to easily decipher pages on the fly. Next to translating complete webpages, it will show you the original text by hovering the mouse over that passage. In some cases this can be helpful, especially when Google tries to translate names of people, places or companies as well.

What if neither DeepL or the Google Translate extension work? Maybe you’re on a page that does not use the Latin alphabet, e.g. Chinese or Arabic, and some of the content is not ASCII-coded. This happens quite often when looking at Asian websites. Another case might be handwritten information in such languages. One of my favorite tools for this is on the Google Translate website itself. Next to the obvious copying and pasting of text, as well as uploading documents, Google allows you to use a foreign language virtual keyboards to input information.

However, this isn’t always helpful. In Arabic, letters vary in shape depending on their position in the word. This makes it hard for someone not proficient in Arabic to use the keyboard. Luckily, there is a workaround!

The Google Translate page allows you to draw what you see and based on that it will make suggestions and translate them. This works really well with any character-based writing, such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese, as well as with other languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet (Russian, Hindi, etc.). I have added a quick video to demonstrate how it works.

As an alternative, I looked into Windows Ink on the Microsoft Translator, but Microsoft currently doesn’t offer an Arabic handwriting package. However, it does offer Russian, Chinese, Hindi and several others character-based alphabets and languages.

When trying to translate subtitles in Videos, there is a workaround that was shared by Hugo Kamaan on Twitter, showing how you can use your cell phone camera to receive instant translations.

There are definitely more tools out there, so feel free to add anything you use frequently or that you think is missing in the comments.

Я надеюсь, что это было полезно для вашего расследования OSINT!

MW-OSINT / 21.07.2019

Pattern of Life Analysis in OSINT

OSINT isn‘t always about the actual content that is collected. Sometimes timestamps and other metadata can be just as useful in investigations.

In my previous job as a SIGINT analyst I wasn‘t always lucky enough to actually intercept the content of communications. Sometimes encryption methods made it impossible to actually see or hear what people were transmitting to each other. In such cases, the analysis of metadata (e.g. phone numbers, date and time, communication type, duration) became almost as important as the analysis of content itself.

We all have certain patterns of life that define how, when and where we communicate. Furthermore, specific events might also have an impact on our communications. In the SIGINT world, I learned how to read metadata in order to assess a target’s behavior and likely actions. Let me give you two quick fictional examples for this.

1. A mafia group regularly communicates using cell phones. They call each other almost daily, just like you or me would also make phone calls to close colleagues on a daily basis. However, every once in a while no phone calls are registered for a period of 2-3 days. Information received from other sources indicate that during these time periods meetings of mafia senior leadership take place and they all switch off their phones so they can‘t be tracked. So the next time a complete network goes silent, we can assume that there is a meeting again.

2. An employee working in a defense research and development lab is not allowed to use his or her phone during work hours. If this is known, then gathering metadata on this phone could easily reveal on which days the employee was actually at work.

Information like this can be used to create a pattern of life based on metadata. The same can also be done in OSINT. In some cases, it might be relevant to know a target‘s daily schedule. This is where social media such as Facebook and Twitter can be useful. Again, keep in mind we are not necessarily looking at the content of a post or (re)tweet, but at the time it was broadcasted. Maybe even the device it was sent from.

Let‘s have a look at some of my tweets over the course of a few months. Each dot represents one tweet. The x-axis shows the dates and the y-axis the time of day I tweeted something. Based on this information you can see when I would usually started my daily tweeting (green line) and when I finished for the day (red line). So my Twitter activities go from roughly 06:00am to 08:00pm.

Next you might notice a Twitter pause sometime in September (orange box). Guess what happened here?

I was on vacation and took a break from my Twitter account! Therefore, if you were to define my pattern of life based on my Twitter activities, you would easily detect any anomalies. A long pause: maybe I‘m on vacation again. A change of general tweeting times: maybe I‘m in a different time zone. No more tweets during the day: maybe I‘m not allowed to tweet at work anymore. Each time you detect such an anomaly, you should start digging into it and see what the actual reason for this change is.

In the aforementioned example I used Twitter, but pattern of life analysis in OSINT basically applies to any service in which communications or interactions have a time stamp, and that‘s basically every social media platform or message board.

So, the next time you notice I‘m offline for a bit, just wish me a happy and relaxed vacation!

MW-OSINT / 16.07.2019

How GDPR affects OSINT

The introduction of GDPR was a shock to many. While there are limitations, it doesn’t prohibit OSINT work completely. Find out what you can or cannot do when conducting investigations.

In almost all OSINT activities, we process (e.g. collect, store, analyse, reproduce) personal data including names, addresses, user names, phone numbers, IP addresses and much more. However, the new data protection legislation introduced in the European Union in May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), restricts the processing of personal data. Therefore, OSINT researchers need to have good understanding of how the GDPR applies to their situations, if only to stay on the legal side with their work.

In this blog post, we will discuss GDPR basics for OSINT researchers. We will not look at the exceptions. Processing personal data for household use or for journalistic purposes are for the most part exempted under the GDPR. Of course, the devil is in the details with respect to when these exemptions actually apply and this blog post will not go into those cases. Also, we will not look at OSINT for law enforcement use, as that has a different legal framework for dealing with personal data.

Hence, we will aim at OSINT in a commercial setting, where the researcher is dealing with matters such as background investigations, third party assessments and pre-employment screenings. Furthermore, this article will only discuss those GDPR aspects which are most relevant for OSINT work as we see it now. The GDPR is an extensive regulation with numerous aspects, which we cannot fully discuss in a single blog post.

Also please keep in mind: We are not lawyers and the implementation of the GDPR can differ between EU countries in numerous details. If you are reading this to seek legal advice, you should consult your friendly lawyer instead.

Summarising the GDPR, the aspects relevant for OSINT work are:

You need a legal basis for processing personal data;
You need to apply certain principles in the processing of personal data;
The data subject of whom you process personal data has specific rights you need to understand, anticipate and honour.
Understand if you are the data controller or the data processor.

Legal basis

Data protection regulation was never meant to render the processing of personal data impossible. Instead it is meant to balance the need for data exchange in our society on the one hand, and the fundamental right of privacy for citizens on the other. It is therefore important to note that privacy is not an absolute right. The GDPR balances this right with other rights by restricting the processing of personal data to instances where there is a legal ground (Article 6). It lists six different grounds, of which three are potentially relevant for OSINT work: consent (Article 6a), legal obligation (Article 6c) and legitimate interest (Article 6f). We will discuss these three in detail.

Article 7 of the GDPR sums up the conditions for consent. Consent is tricky because the GDPR states that the data subject should have free choice when giving consent. However, for example, free choice in an employer/employee relationship does not really exist. Consent can – according to the GDPR – also be withdrawn at any time. So what happens when a data subject withdraws his or her consent halfway into an investigation? Or when it turns out afterwards, that the consent cannot be regarded as given freely?

Due to this ambiguous legal nature of consent under the GDPR, we believe that for OSINT investigations the use of consent should be avoided whenever possible. The risk that the data subject could afterwards argue that he or she had no choice than to give consent because of the consequences at risk, is simply too large. Moreover, often it is practically not possible to obtain consent especially if you, for example, are examining social media of the circles around your subject.

The second potential ground for processing personal data, that may be relevant for OSINT work, is legal obligation. This could be the case when your client has the obligation to identify their customers and the source of their funds under Anti Money Laundering (AML) regulations. Especially if you are instructed by a financial institution, this may likely be the overall legal basis for your OSINT work.

The third ground for processing personal data that may be relevant for OSINT work is a legitimate interest of your client.

What is legitimate interest? This is a tricky question, as it does not directly relate to any other law or regulation. Imagine the following scenario: A large stock-listed fashion company is in the process of hiring a new CEO. A final candidate is presented and the company puts him through a pre-employment screening. The company is known for their strong stance against animal cruelty and has supported many awareness campaigns in this regard. It has become their corporate identity. During the pre-employment screening pictures are found on social media, showing the CEO-candidate participating in annual fox hunts. If this information would leak when the CEO is already in position, it would surely cause a major scandal, possibly decreasing the stock value of the company and causing job layoffs.

The scenario described above could be a legitimate interest, as the financial situation of the company and thus the prosperity of many employees could be affected be the actions of one person. Nonetheless, pre-employment screenings are frowned upon in certain EU-countries.

Another example can be a simple fraud investigation, where you are tasked with identifying possible assets belonging to a person suspected of fraudulent actions. Your client claims to be defrauded and would like to initiate legal action. As such, the client has a legitimate interest to instruct you identifying possible assets of the perpetrator.

In sum, as an OSINT investigator, you should always understand and document the legal basis to process personal data before conducting your research. In a commercial setting, that will most often be either be a legal obligation or a legitimate interest of your client. We advise to always properly document the legal basis, for example, by explicitly detailing the situation in an engagement letter or contract for the work. More in general, and from an ethical point of view, we believe that you should always want to understand what the purpose of your work is and the interest of the client.

Principles

Regardless the exact legal basis, Article 5 of the GDPR imposes a number of principles for the actual processing of personal data. Each of these are relevant for OSINT work and therefore we will discuss them all.

Lawfulness, fairness and transparency

Lawfulness is self-explanatory: You need a legal basis to process the personal data. This should be one of the six legal bases as provided in Article 6. Furthermore, you should not hack, steal or lie to get the data and to prove this, you need to document the sources – which a professional OSINT researcher would do anyway. Not only are these actions unfair and unethical, they may as well be illegal in many cases. Fairness also relates to proportionality. Is the amount of personal data you collect on the data subject proportional to the task at hand? Transparency is touched upon in more detail in Article 14 of the GDPR (situations where the data is not collected from the data subject), we will discuss this further along.

Purpose limitation

Again, pretty easy. What you collect for one purpose, shouldn’t be used for another incompatible purpose.

Data minimization

You should minimise the amount of personal data to what you really need. As much as necessary, as little as possible. So when you scrape gigabytes of data, only the information relevant to your task should be retained.

Accuracy

You have the obligation to make sure that data is of good quality, thus do not use outdated information or data of which you know it is incorrect. Especially when working with people search engines, you will stumble upon a lot of old or false info (false flags) on individuals. You are responsible for verifying the data where possible before further processing or reporting.

Storage limitation

How long do you retain your records? The GDPR states that it should not be longer than needed. In an ongoing litigation that could be years, but often not more that general data retention obligations such as in civil or tax law should be followed. Again, this can differ per country.

Integrity and confidentiality

You are responsible for keeping the personal data you process secure. The fact that you may have collected it from open sources is completely irrelevant, it shouldn’t be publically disclosed from your side. The adagio here is: If you cannot protect it, don’t collect it.

Accountability

The basically means that when processing data you should not only adhere to the previous principles, you should also be able to demonstrate afterwards that you did. The GDPR has shifted the burden of proof to those processing personal data, so you need to document!

A most efficient solution to document on how you comply with the GDPR is to draft an investigation protocol in which you describe how you process personal data and how you apply these principles to your work. In any assignment or when you get questions from the Data Protection Authority (DPA), you can refer to the protocol.

Data subject rights

The third category of GDPR provisions relevant for OSINT, is the data subject rights. According to GDPR, a data subject has rights of:

Notification

Every data subject shouldbe notified which personal data is processed by whom, why and where. GDPR Article 13 and 14 state that no matter if collected from the subject itself or without knowledge of the data subject, they must be informed in order to be able to contest this data collection and processing. Again, this proves to be tricky, especially when conducting investigations against a certain subject.

In some cases, the notification might be disproportional in regards to effort that has to be made in order to inform the data subject.

Every data subject has the right of access, right to rectification, right to erasure, right to restriction

If informed, a data subject has the right of access to all data stored on him- or herself, the right to restrict further dissemination (if not necessary by law), and last but not least the right to have all data deleted. Of course, this must be weighed against the legal basis or legitimate interests upon which the investigations took place.

There is also an exemption on these rights possible under article 23 of the GDPR which states that Member States can limit the obligations and rights under the GDPR in certain instances. This has to be done by law and every Member State may have implemented this provision differently. The Netherlands have Article 41 of their national implementing law which fully integrates Article 23 GDPR. Does your country have the same?

Of course, if you would use an exemption, you need to document the circumstances and considerations on why you think that this exemption is justified. Be careful with this and understand the local implementation of the (conditions for) exemptions before you apply them.

Are you the controller?

A final important point relevant for OSINT work is whether you are the data ‘controller’ (the one who determines the purposes and means of the processing of the personal data) or the data ‘processor’ (the one who processes personal data on behalf of a controller).

The easiest situation is where you are the data processor and you process data under responsibility of the data controller. In those instances, most of the legal obligations are mainly the responsibility of the data controller, which usually is your client.

However, the determination on whether you are the processer depends on the level of freedom you have in choosing the purpose and methods of processing the data. If you determine the purpose, types of data and methods applied, you cannot argue that you are just the processor, as you in fact ‘control’ the data processing.

Having a data processing agreement with a client – or adding a section on data processing to your existing agreement – is an important prerequisite to be regarded as the processor. To be regarded as the processor, the agreement should clearly show that you are instructed for a specific purpose, looking at specific types of data and applying specific methods (and excluding anything else) and reporting in a specific way. Once more, consult your friendly lawyer for more details.

There is limited jurisprudence on GDPR issues and this means, that in many instances it is not exactly sure how the GDPR will be interpreted exactly. The principles should give some guidance, nonetheless, in high profile cases make sure you discuss these matters with your client and (their) inhouse legal counsel.

We have given a general overview of the most relevant aspects of the GDPR for OSINT work. However, we realise that we are not complete in that matter. The GDPR has a number of other relevant articles, for example on processing of special categories of personal data, but there are limits to what we can cover in one blog post.

So, get your copy of the GDPR today as well as a copy of the implementing law in your country, read it, seek advice, understand it and most important: Comply with it!

Ludo Block & MW-OSINT (I just chipped in a little)/ 11.06.2019

Tracking a Hacker with OSINT

My blog has been hacked! Someone defaced the page and looking into the technical details didn’t provide any leads to the culprit. Maybe OSINT can help in this case.

Today’s article will look into cyber attribution and how OSINT can help identify the perpetrator of a cyberattack or other hacking exploits. Keep in mind, as long as the perpetrator does not make any mistakes it will be hard to track him down. Even if the actual person behind an attack cannot be found, hints on the hacker’s background may help narrow things down to a specific target group or origin. Let us have a closer look at the defacement shown above.

As stated, looking into technical details (IP-address, code, etc.) did not reveal anything useful. So we have to take a closer look at the tag and handle that was placed on our site. A reverse image search was conducted and did not show any results. The hacker goes by the name “drag0nw1ng١٩٨١”, this exact search-term also came up inconclusive. The Arabic numbers in the handle may be an indicator for the hacker’s cultural background. Next up, we will search for the handle in different variations, including a “standardized” one:

Not many results to look at here, so we can easily go through each and every page. Next to a Russian PlayStation profile named Dragonwing1981, we stumble upon some interesting results that might be related to our case.

Several data-breaches and leaks show an email address using the exact name. Dragonwing1981@yahoo.com was registered to a member of an internet forum called Kataib Hezbollah. This forum in Arabic language no longer exists and was used to disseminate terrorist propaganda. Since our hacker used Arabic numbers in his handle and the handle seems quite unique (based on the low amount of Google results), the email address might be linked to our guy.

The oldest mentioning of “dragonwing1981” came from another internet forum. In August 2004, the forum was hacked by someone with the email address we found before:

Research done by the forum members linked the perpetrator to Iraq:

Looks like things are coming together. There is one more approach we can try, in order to back our claims further. When using the password reset function in Yahoo, it gives you parts of the phone number (without the country code). Let us see what happens, when we try to reset Dragonwing’s password:

07 is the operator code used by Iraqi mobile networks and the length of the number also fits Iraqi mobile phone numbers. Luckily, Yahoo (unlike Google) displays the exact amount of digits of a phone number.

Let us review the evidence we have collected so far:

Use of Arabic numbers in the handle
Unique handle, not found often on the internet
Username and a related email address found in an Arabic internet forum
Email address used in a hack in 2004, identified as possibly originating from Iraq
Phone number linked to the email address possibly an Iraqi mobile phone number

Can we be sure that all these pieces of evidence are really linked to each other? Not really, but that is why we use words of estimative probability in intelligence analysis. Cyber attribution is not always about tradecraft, infrastructure or the malware/attack itself. Digging into individual actors may help shed light upon the origins of cyber-attacks and the OSINT process shown above should always be incorporated into any research effort as soon as “personal data” (e.g. tags, names, handles) is involved.

Of course, we could just send Dragonwing1981 an email and congratulate him on his defacement. However, unlike other stories on my blog, this one is completely made up and is based on a CTF-task I created for the OSINT courses I instruct. As far as I am concerned, Dragonwing1981 is innocent…

MW-OSINT / 02.05.2019

Intelligence Collection on the Train

Sometimes I miss my SIGINT days: Listening into my target’s phone calls and getting juicy intelligence out of this. However, you don’t always need SIGINT to eavesdrop on interesting conversations.

The company that I work for offers a broad variety of security products. When it comes to securing valuable data and information, most of our customers rely on technical solutions. However, the best firewalls and security suites will not help, if information is continuously disclosed outside of hardened IT-environments by careless employees. As a former SIGINTer I was always astonished about how much information my intelligence targets would openly share over non-secure lines. Now that I left SIGINT behind, I still have the chance to eavesdrop on conversations every once in a while.

I have a one-hour commute to work each day and the time I am on the train has proven to be a valuable social engineering and OSINT training ground. Two weeks ago, I was sitting on the train when a gentleman sat down next to me and immediately started making phone calls.

https://unsplash.com/@jcgellidon

The second phone call went to a woman named Kelly Adams. I know this because I could see her name on the screen of his phone. I could hear everything he said and since his volume was cranked up, I could also hear parts of what Kelly had said. Curious as I am, I immediately googled Kelly. Based on what I had heard, I could narrow it down to three individuals. One woman working for a large German defense company and two others in IT firms. The topic of the conversation was a pretty significant retention bonus that Kelly would receive, if she decided to stay with the company and move to Munich. It turns out the company was currently relocating its headquarters to Munich.

As soon as the gentleman ended this conversation, he started writing emails on his phone. Again in plain sight and did I mention that I am very curious? It turned out his name is Andreas Müller. Searching for the combination “Kelly Adams” and “Andreas Müller” led to the exact company. Dr. Andreas Müller was the head of the research and development department of a large German defense company and Kelly was one of the leading project managers for a specific branch. I did not need any sophisticated OSINT skills here, a simple Google query and LinkedIn search was enough. Dr. Müller then sent the details of the retention bonus to someone named Alfred, whom I assume was in HR. If I would have been working for an opposing company, I could have easily used this information to counter the offer Kelly received. But wait, it gets even better!

Next up, Dr. Müller opened spreadsheets depicting the budget of certain projects. Dr. Müller was sitting on my right and I held my phone to my right ear, simulated a conversation and managed to get a couple pictures of his screen. As of now, I had seen enough and it was time to approach him.

“Excuse me, Dr. Müller. May I ask you a question?”

You should have seen the look on his face. Surprised and shocked, as he was clearly not expecting this. I asked him if the conversations and the emails he had looked at were sensitive. I told him what I had picked up from his conversation with Kelly and showed him a picture of the spreadsheet. Still shocked, he did not really know how to react. I explained my line of work and handed him a business card. Dr. Müller can consider himself lucky, usually I charge customers for this kind of consulting and I think he learned a valuable lesson.

Remember: No matter how good your cyber security measures are, the most important aspect is minimizing human error and taking security serious at all times. I have often read that there is no patch for human stupidity. I do not agree and I am sure that Dr. Müller has been “patched” after our train ride.

I guess I never will be able to let the SIGINT side of me go. I just love eavesdropping in on people, so be careful what you say in public or on your phone, you never know if someone is listening!

MW-OSINT / 26.03.2019