If you follow me, I’ll OSINT you

I tend to have a look at the profiles following me on Twitter or trying to connect on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn I’ve become a little picky on whom to connect with and they have to match my career interests. On Twitter I just look for red flags in general. If your profile promotes racism and hate speech, deliberately spreads disinformation or supports Borussia Dortmund, I will block you (just kidding on the last one). Of course, I can’t do a deep dive into each and every follower on Twitter. But today I would like to show you what kind of red flags I look for and how these can lead to further investigations.

Follow me and I’ll check out your profile

Around lunch time I noticed a new follower on Twitter.

Martin recently joined Twitter and hasn’t tweeted yet. He is following 25 accounts, has no followers of his own and something about his profile picture is odd.

Since I have created many pictures using This Person Does Not Exist, I could immediately tell that the image above was created on that site. The alignment of the eyes, the weird ears and several other glitches were a sure sign of this. My buddy Nixintel wrote a great blog on how to identify such images a while back and I highly encourage you to read it.

Next up, I had a look at the other accounts Martin choose to follow. Most of them where Russia-friendly accounts, often spreading Russian propaganda, some even known conspiracy theorists. Next to the apparent German name, Martin was following German-speaking people on Twitter. So I am pretty sure he is German-speaking as well.

And in between all these, there where some accounts that actually investigate the general topics I mentioned above (Russia & disinformation). For me, this leaves two possibilities: Martin is either interested in the Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories from an investigative standpoint, or he supports them. It is not uncommon for supporters of conspiracy theories or foreign propaganda to follow those who try to debunk this disinformation (e.g. Bellingcat), so they can troll them. But why did he choose to follow me then, and not only me but also OSINTgeek?

OSINTgeek and I have many things in common, but none of these is any affiliation with the aforementioned topics. However, we are currently best known for organizing the German Open Source Intelligence Conference (or GOSINTCon). I could not see any interaction between Martin and the GOSINTCon Twitter account, so I decided to check our LinkedIn profile. Among the followers we received this afternoon, I found the following account:

Both follows must have happened roughly around the same time. Now let’s have a look at this Martin Krüger.

Same name, different picture and also 25 connections. The picture seemed a little too good looking in my opinion. I ran a quick reverse image search on the profile picture and could see it was an often used stock photo. This was so obvious, that even Google found it!

The fact that this profile only had 25 connections, led to the assumption that it was recently created. Looking into the CV posted on LinkedIn I saw several other things that caught my eye.

I googled the name in connection with the mentioned employers and came up completely empty handed. The CV shown here also had some inconsistencies. Large gaps between apparent jobs, and to me it looked like someone just quickly and very sloppily punched something into to LinkedIn here with a mix of German and English.

All in all, both profiles seem to be sock puppets in my opinion. I thought about if I should write this up or not, as there is a very slight chance that Martin does exist. However, the name is quite common in Germany and nothing shown here can be considered as doxxing. So, this goes out to Martin:

If you are real, you might want to clean up your LinkedIn profile. Those inexplicable gaps in your CV certainly will not help your career. If you are indeed a sock puppet: gotcha! You might want to read about how to set up a proper sock puppet on the OSINT curious site or another example of how not to do so on my blog. And while sock puppets are not a topic in this year’s GOSINTCon, come back next year and we might have a talk on that.

MW-OSINT / 16.11.2020

Social Media around the World

When most people speak of social media, the have the ‘Big 3’ in mind: Facebook, Instagram & Twitter. But social media is so much more than just these three platforms, especially when it comes to OSINT on intelligence targets that don’t speak English.

In OSINT investigations we often end up scavenging social media to find information on our intelligence targets. Who are they connected to? Where have they been? What are their interests? These and many more questions can be answered by having a look a person’s profile. However, social media is constantly evolving and platforms that were relevant yesterday may not be relevant tomorrow. When I ask my daughter about Facebook, she says: “Facebook is for old people”. Thus, she does not have an account there. You would most likely find her dancing in TikTok videos, as with many other Generation Z youths. So age clearly defines which social media platforms are used. Another defining factor is the cultural background someone has. Maybe Facebook was never that big in that person’s country. The following graphic shows the evolution of social media worldwide and how Facebook became the most used platform. However, in some countries other platforms still have the upper hand and not all ‘legacy’ platforms overtaken by Facebook have been shut down. In this article I would like to give a brief overview of some of the lesser known platforms that may be useful for OSINT investigations.

VKontakte & Odnoklassniki

If your intelligence target is from a Russian-speaking country or has a Russian cultural background (or is a right-wing idiot that thinks he is being censored on Facebook), chances are high you might find this person on one of the Russian Facebook clones. The platforms VKontake (‘in contact’) and Odnoklassniki (‘classmates’) are very similar to Facebook when it comes to the functionality offered and the basic OSINT research techniques that can be applied here.

Above you can see a VKontakte profile. A profile picture, some more detailed information including a birthdate and current residence city, a friend list as well as posts and pictures. Pretty much what you can find on an average Facebook profile. As with other social media platforms, a user can choose to alter the privacy settings to hide information, so some profiles may not have an open friend list or may not share all posts with the overall public. An interesting feature on VKontakte is in the top right of the image: information when the profile was last active. In OSINT this is really helpful to figure out if a user is still active on the platform, even if no current content is posted. In many cases this last activity will lead back to the use of VKontakte as a messenger. People might not post content anymore, but will stay В Контакте (in contact) with others through this platform. The search functionality of VKontake is in some ways superior to what we now have on Facebook. At the top of the page is a search box. Filling in a search term here will enable us to browse through different categories of results and narrow these down by adding additional filters.

As you can see, you can filter people by age range, birth date information and even their views on smoking an alcohol. Posts can be sorted by the number of likes or the mentioning of specific links. All in all, there are some pretty neat filters in here.

Odnoklassniki is very similar, having friend lists, a date of birth on most profiles and information when the user was last active. The good thing with both VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, is that they accept multiple language settings, so you can use the platform in English and also a couple of other languages. If you search for names in Latin script, it will also show you corresponding results in Cyrillic script.

The last activity is right underneath the profile name and the searches in Odnoklassniki offer filters just like in VKontakte. They even allow users to add holiday destinations, which are also a filter criteria.

As I mentioned, this article is just a quick overview of some foreign social media platforms. There lots of other cool OSINT techniques that can help research here, including third-party sites to search by profile pics or sites that help with geo-referenced searches. But let’s leave that for future blog posts. Another example I want to show is very popular in the Persian-speaking community.

Facenama

Facenama is a big social media platform mainly used in Iran. At quick glance on SimilarWeb shows that this site is also accessed from other countries, as there are Iranian communities throughout the world.

Facenama looks very much like Facebook. Even the coloring scheme is identical (to the old Facebook UI).

Unfortunately, there is no way to change the language settings, but luckily the Google translate browser extension works quite well here.

The search bar in the top right of the page will enable you to search for user profiles. Just remember that the default language is Farsi, so most profiles will be in Arabic script (including profile names) and typing will occur from right to left.

The profiles will have the same type of information we have seen in the Russian sites: date of birth, friends, posts and much more (if these aren’t hidden due to privacy settings). Remember that dates will be shown in Persian, so you’ll probably have to use a calendar converter to make sense of these dates.

I could go on for hours listing and showing social media platforms: Gab for right wing nut jobs, Stayfriends for old German people, NK for Polish people and don’t even get me started on Chinese social media. The bottom line is, that there is more out there than just the ‘Big 3’ (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). Before you start investigating someone, you should figure out where you might find these people online. Their age, culture, language, country of origin and personal taste will affect their choice of which web platforms they use and these might not always be in English. So, in the ongoing discussion of what I would like to get better at in OSINT, I didn’t choose to learn programming languages such as Python to automate tasks. I’d rather get a better grasp of languages (Arabic, Farsi, Russian, etc.) in general and master tools that help translate to help bolster my research efforts.

MW-OSINT / 04.10.2020

Using the WIPO IP Portal for OSINT

Conducting due diligence, business intelligence, competitive intelligence or just trying to identify a company logo through reverse image searching? The WIPO IP Portal might be able to help you out with those tasks.

One of my favorite sites when it comes to researching companies is the WIPO IP Portal. WIPO stands for World Intellectual Patent Organization and is an UN agency specialized on protecting intellectual property (IP) worldwide. Their Patentscope database allows you to search for patents, and they also incorporate (trade-)mark and design databases in this portal. Sometimes looking through this data will provide additional information on company affiliations or indications on upcoming products.

Let me give you a brief theoretical example. Your client has asked you to perform a pre-employment screening on the potential new head of research and development. Her CV does not show anything unusual, no past links to current competitors are noted here and the interview went quite well. When asked about any links to the competition, she denied having any. Using the WIPO database, an old patent is found in which she is mentioned as co-inventor together with a man that went on and founded a rival company in which he is still acting CEO. Whether or not any ties between the two still exist, is definitely something that should be discussed. This is just one example of how the WIPO portal can be used. Other areas are due diligence checks, business intelligence or competitive intelligence and even reverse image searching company logos.

Searching within the patent database Patentscope is quite simple. Once on the main page patentscope.wipo.int, you can query your search term worldwide. This could be the name of an individual, a company name or a specific product or keyword. The search allows Boolean operators such as “AND”, “OR” and quotation marks, just like you would use them in Google. Furthermore, the drop-down menu on the left allows you to choose the field in which your query is to be performed.

I decided to see which patents contain “OSINT”. As a result, OSINT is found in 77 entries. The list of results can sorted in various ways and foreign language content can be translated automatically (I’ll show that later).

Browsing through the results, I found a patent that looked quite interesting. A company named VERINT Systems Ltd. filed a patent to use social network analysis for target profiling. Maybe I can learn something from this patent. Clicking on the patent number will lead to the details of this filing.

We can see that this patent was applied for in Israel on 31.10.2011 (Application Date). By clicking on the tabs below the headline, you can access the description of the patent, the claims (what can this do?), any drawings that were filed with it and in some cases the original documents can be downloaded. VERINT Systems Ltd. is an American company founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer. Most of VERINT’s staff is working in Israel. That’s likely why this patent was registered in Israel. Had I not known that VERINT had Israeli roots, this patent could have been a starting point for further research into why the company registered it in Israel first. Another reason, next to the fact that most of their personnel is stationed there, could be that Israel is a primary target market.

Next up, I looked up “VERINT Systems Ltd” to see all the patents the company had registered. Among these was also the one previously mentioned, which had now been filed in the US as well. Such patents will include additional data regarding the preceding or original patent they are based on. The data field “Priority Data” on the bottom left is hyperlinked to the Israeli patent shown above. Furthermore, this patent also includes the name of the inventor, which we could also query.

As I mentioned before, the database will translate content in foreign languages automatically and allows you to choose which translation service you would like to use. This VERINT patent was filed in South Korea. By clicking on “Machine Translation” on top right, we can have this content translated. I picked Google translate in this case.

As you can see, using Patentscope could help you find out more about a company’s past and future activities, help you find people linked to the company and provide leads regarding their main area of operations. This database is basically a meta search engine, so always make sure to check to national patent registries too, as these might have current data that hasn’t been ingested into Patentscope yet. Researching patents is not all that can be done on this site. As mentioned in the first paragraph, (trade-)marks and designs can also be queried. For this, you have to click on the menu button in the top left corner and then navigate to “MARKS” or “DESIGNS”. Under “MARKS” use the “Global Brand Database”, under “DESIGNS” go to “Global Designs Database”.

The search for trademarks is quite easy. In the left tab (SEARCH BY), you can add filters to your query. I decided to search for an organization named UNITER that is (was) located in Germany. Underneath the SEARCH BY box, you’ll see the current query you have built. This system allows you to build very complex queries.

However, my favorite part is the integrated reverse image search. This can be found in the right tab (FILTER BY) under images.

You can upload an image here and adjust your search using “Pick a strategy” and “Pick an image type”. Hovering your mouse over the options will give you a brief description of what they do. I’ve uploaded an image and picked the “concept” strategy, as well as “nonverbal” image type (which means there is no text in my image).

I downloaded this image from the UNITER Facebook page. The first result is a perfect match. The image was registered by an organization in Switzerland. Those of you who know more about UNITER will understand why.

To sum it up, the WIPO database offers a lot of useful features for OSINTers, providing leads on individuals, companies, technologies and even a very powerful reverse image search for logos. I’m gonna go back to all the patents regarding OSINT, WEBINT and intelligence in general and start combing through them. Another case of OSINT on OSINT…

MW-OSINT / 03.05.2020

Be careful what you OSINT with

There are lots of neat OSINT platforms out there to make your life easier. But how many of you vet the software before using it? Not every platform should be entrusted with sensitive data as this case reveals.

In January 2019 I was tagged on Twitter, asking for my input on an OSINT platform named Lampyre. Before I use any type of software, I try to vet it as good as possible. This includes OSINT research on the company, asking tech-savy people I know for their opinion and ultimately reaching out to the company itself. No one had really heard of the software at that time, no one was using it, and I couldn’t really find much background information online. I ended up contacting Lampyre and asking them where they came from, what their background was and a couple of other questions. Unfortunately, they only sent evasive answers. They wouldn’t even tell me which country they were based in. I tried the software on one of my VMs and tested it with fake or non-relevant data. To be honest, I did like what I saw, but I decided not to use it operationally. As time passed, I noticed that many OSINTers started using the software and decided to have another look into the company and people behind it. It turns out, I was right not to use this platform. Lampyre isn’t who they claim they are. I teamed up with several helpful elves (to be honest, they did most of the work) and we found some pretty disturbing information.

Lampyre is apparently made by a company in Budapest (Hungary) called Data Tower. The company itself was registered in February 2019 and the CEO and sole shareholder is Laszlo Schmidt. The original address used to register the company leads to a law firm and the phone number that Data Tower provides belongs to another law firm in which Laszslo Schmidt is working as a lawyer. This information points to the fact that Data Tower is merely a shell company. So, how do you we get to the people behind Lampyre?

Looking into their online presence doesn’t lead to any notable individuals either. Some of the names used, such as John Galt, are most likely pseudonyms or fake accounts. Since searching for people didn’t provide any leads, we decided to look into the traffic that Lampyre sends to its back end in each query. The queries contain a brief description on what is requested and apparently the local language used by the developers is Russian, as each description is written not only in English but also in Russian.

Why should a company based in Hungary use Russian as their local language setting? Of course, the developers could be Russians working in Budapest, but again something just doesn’t seem right here: an organization that shows signs of being a shell company, the lack of transparency when directly confronted and now indications that point towards Russia. Decompiling the software showed further Russian language embedded in the code:

While this was being done, more OSINT research revealed a person named Andrey Skhomenko. This guy posted Python modules for Lampyre on Github and knew about the product in March 2018, way before it was released to public in October 2018. Andrey is based in Moscow and used to have a LinkedIn profile as well (which has been deleted in the meantime).

According to his LinkedIn, Andrey worked for the Russian Federal Security Service (also known as FSB) in the past and is now working for a company called Norsi-Trans. Norsi-Trans produces SIGINT and lawful interception equipment and software for the Russian government. It turns out that Norsi Trans also sells an OSINT platform called Vitok-ROI (or Vitok-OSINT).

The overall look of this platform reminded me of something I had seen before. Oh, that’s right! Both Lampyre and Vitok-OSINT have that Win95/Win98 appearance, not only in the network visualization, but also the software itself.

So far, this was just a gut feeling. Could anymore evidence be found that would link these two products and thus Norsi Trans and Data Tower? You bet? We pulled the certificates used by Lampyre and saw that they were registered in Russia and even more compelling: one of the certificates made a direct reference to Vitok.

This was the final nail in the coffin. Lampyre and Norsi Trans are in fact connected! While there is still plenty to be discovered, I think we have proof that Lampyre and Data Tower are not fully honest. And as everything you query in Lampyre is probably sent to Russian servers, I am happy I decided not to use this tool in my private and professional investigations. After all, Russia mandates decryption for domestic services.

Maybe Lampyre is Norsi Trans’ attempt to sell their software in the western world, maybe it is a rogue operation by a Norsi Trans employee (or a few). Although, I personally have doubts about that second theory. The software is quite powerful and receives regular updates. To create something like this, you’d surely need more than one person and having a rogue team within a company try to pull this off would surely not go unnoticed. What I find most interesting, is the fact that Andrey stated he had worked for the FSB. To put it in the words of one of my former colleagues: You don’t leave Russian intelligence services, you just change your cover and continue working for them.

MW-OSINT / 23.03.2020

Using the Microsoft Video Indexer for OSINT

Working on a case in which you have to go through loads of videos? Wouldn’t it be awesome to just download the videos and have them automatically transcribed and indexed?

Imagine you are following a current event that is topic of multiple videos throughout the internet. In some cases, you might not have the time to watch each and every video yourself. Wouldn’t it be great to download all these videos into one database and have them indexed by spoken content, topics and even people that appear in the videos? And wouldn’t it be even better to be able to search for specific content in those indexed videos?

These features, and many more, are part of the tool-set that the Microsoft Video Indexer offers. Microsoft allows a trial account on this platform and it enables you to login with various different account types, among them also Gmail. Let me point out some aspects of this platform, that might be useful during OSINT investigations.

Let’s go back to August 2019. The G7 summit is taking place in France and we’re interested collecting information on this topic. This summit is all over social media and there is also quite some press reporting on it. We download videos from sources like Youtube. For this we can use Y2Mate. Either by copying the Youtube link to their website or by adding ‘pp’ to the original Youtube-URL as shown below. This will automatically redirect you to the site.

Remember, that we’re not just limited to Youtube videos. We can upload Youtube videos and any other video to the Video Indexer. It’s pretty self-explanatory, the only thing to be aware of is the video language. The default value is English. If working with videos in another language, I would advise manually adjusting the input language. I have come across issues when uploading longer videos. In case you come across problems here, trying splitting the videos.

Once the video is uploaded, it will be indexed by the platform and this is where the magic happens. Here are some of the features that are included in this process:

Facial recognition
Full transcript of the audio, including translations
Topic detection
Item/setting detection
Sentiment detection

Let’s have a look at one of the videos I uploaded:

The panel on the right has two tabs: insights and timeline. Under insights you will find an overview of individuals that were identified in the video and also recognized by the underlining facial recognition software. As you can see, a guy named Stefan de Vries was recognized and the bar below shows the sections in which he appears in the video (highlighted in black). It also links to Bing search results of this person. If a person is not recognized and indexed automatically, you can manually edit this.

Unknown #12 is in fact Angela Merkel. By clicking on the edit button on the top right, we can change the name. By giving the people the same name, they will be automatically merged. The following two insight categories index general topics discussed in the video and also label the scenes by what can be seen. Marking a topic or label will show the section in which this appears in the video. Clicking on that highlighted section will jump forward to that specific part in the video, which is always displayed on the left. Keep in mind, that these results are not always plausible. In my video, a scene showing Donald Trump starting to speak was labeled as toiletry (although some people consider him to be a douche).

Next up, named entities are extracted and the sentiment is evaluated. I assume the sentiment evaluation is based on the words used. Words such as good, great and awesome will likely lead to a positive sentiment rating. Remember that these words are not always used in the proper context by the speaker, so I usually ignore this feature.

Most of the data shown in the insight tab is based off the speaker transcription, which is displayed in the timeline tab. Although it works pretty well, you might need to manually edit some of the data. In this final sentence shown here, I manually edited something.: instead of “my Chrome”, the speaker said “Macron”.

Looking into a video in a foreign language? In this case you can use the translate function to make it (kind of) readable. Just click on the world icon and choose the output language and the complete text will be translated.

So, we’ve uploaded a few videos, manually edited a few things and now have a fully indexed database of videos to run queries on. Going back to the main page of your profile, you will be able to search for anything that has been indexed: text, keywords, people and labels.

Searching for “Trump” will display the search results and categorize them by result types, as they are listed above the search results. This is just an excerpt of all the results, but you can see that a person, spoken text, a named entity and even written text were found. Written text? That’s one point I almost forgot. The Video Indexer also OCRs written text in videos.

That was just a brief overview of the possibilities of Microsoft’s Video Indexer. I think it can be useful for some OSINT investigations and if you really think about using this more intensely, you might want to consider upgrading to a paid account.

I was actually thinking about uploading talks from conferences, so I could create a database in which I could query specific OSINT topics without having to watch the complete videos. A TL;DR for videos 😊

MW-OSINT / 08.03.2020

Car Spotting and OSINT

Looking for specific car? Next to googling it, you could try a car spotting site to find pictures that might provide further leads for your OSINT investigations.

A while back, @Wondersmith_Rae wrote a great article on maritime OSINT. In this, vessel tracking sites were mentioned, which allow us to identify ships and monitor their movements. Wouldn’t it be neat to have something similar for cars?

While we will never be able to track and identify cars just as good as we can track large ships, this article will provide some useful hints that can help with OSINT on vehicles. But which data is relevant when researching cars and motorcycles? As most vehicles are mass-produced, research based solely on the manufacturer, model and color might be a bit challenging. So, we will need unique identifiers such as the VIN or license plate.

The VIN, or vehicle identification number, is a 17-digit code which is assigned to every vehicle when it’s manufactured. The are several paid databases that will enable looking-up a VIN and retrieving information on the vehicle and possibly its history. If you don’t want to spend money, just try googling the VIN. Since it is so unique, you probably won’t receive a lot of results and thus not many false positives.

One of my favorite free sites to obtain information on VINs and vehicles in the US is Poctra. This site crawls the web for salvage vehicles and archives all available information and pictures. Let us see what Poctra reveals on the VIN I had googled.

High-res images, the location of the auction, mileage and sometimes even a license plate. There are plenty of pivot points to conduct more OSINT here.

If we have a license plate, and the car is something a car spotter might take interest in, we might find images of it on various car spotter websites. Next to PlatesMania, my favorite site is Autogespot. Both allow to search by license plate.

Enough theory, time for a practical example. Arsenal London football player Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was often seen with a Ferrari LaFerrari. Even though he lives in London, this vehicle does not carry a British license plate. A great repository of license plates can be found at World License Plates, in case you have to figure out which country the license plate originates from first. It turns out that Aubameyang’s Ferrari is registered in Germany. His license plate is AIB-Q 1414. Let us see if we can find this car on Autogespot.

By clicking on “More Filters” on the top right of the website, we can define our query.

This leads to several results, each containing multiple high-res images. Not all images are publicly accessible if you are not a paying member of Autogespot, but there is a workaround to retrieve the pictures hidden behind the paywall. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The top left entry shows that Aubameyang’s Ferrari was spotted in London on 21 September 2019 and that this sighting contains 10 pictures. The spotter also links his Instagram account, which might lead to further images. So, make sure you always pivot your investigations to these additional profiles as well.

Sometimes, we can retrieve the other pictures from Autogespot even without paying for a premium account. Just copy the URL of the page you are on and query it in Google. Then have a look at the image results. Here are the other nine images:

The information we now obtained is once more useful as a pivot point for further investigations. Maybe we can geolocate the exact location the vehicle was parked at and thus know where Aubamayeng was on 21 September 2019 after lunch. Maybe these pictures could provide evidence that a vehicle was damaged prior to a current insurance claim. There are many reasons why tracking and identifying vehicles may be useful. When researching license plates, keep in mind that a simple search engine query or query within social media might also lead to results. In our case, it leads us to results on Twitter, Instagram and press articles, next to the car spotter sites we have looked at already.

There are plenty of other platforms worldwide that track vehicles and allow queries by license plate, another one of my personal favorites is Nomerogram (Номерограм) in Russia. This site not only displays luxury cars, but also every-day, ordinary cars. I guess this is related to Russian’s love of dashcams, resulting in a massive amount of video and imagery on all kinds of traffic participants.

With the techniques and sources shown above, a vehicle can be manually tracked to a certain extent. This tracking, however, will rely on geolocating the image. To practice this, I recommend participating in the @quiztime geolocation challenges on Twitter. In a future blog article, I’ll look at Wigle and see how this platform could help track cars as well.

Until then, have fun looking up exotic cars on the aforementioned sites. That is, unless you prefer going through pictures of banged-up, rusty Ladas on Nomerogram. Hey, I’m not judging!

MW-OSINT / 07. December 2019

Researching Right-Wing Extremism in Central Europe

How to start investigations on right-wing extremists? Work your way through multiple social media platforms and combine information to generate leads!

The recent Iron March Leak once again showed the extent of right-wing extremism within our society. This leak provided a massive mount of data to conduct online investigations. While Iron March was shut down, the individuals behind it still use many other platforms to disseminate their thoughts and ideas and to communicate among each other. Of course, the new communication channels they use won’t be found with a mere Google search. In order to find such sites, we will have to follow the digital breadcrumbs across various social media networks. In this article, I would like to show starting points for OSINT research and how to work your way through different platforms to identify potentially relevant information when tracking down right-wing extremists.

Looking through social media, we will unfortunately find lots of people that follow a racist or fascist ideology. These people might not be the actual targets we are looking for, but they could lead us to them. Especially in Germany and other central European countries, many people have left Facebook and Twitter after their accounts were temporarily suspended or deleted upon sharing hate speech, which under certain circumstances is a criminal offence. They found refuge on the Russian Facebook-clone VKontakte (short: VK) and Gab, as an alternative to Twitter. In order to access information on these platforms, we will of course have to create sockpuppets. VK also allows logging on with a Facebook-account, as do many other social media platforms.

Let us start our research from scratch. First, we will have to identify individuals that might be worth investigating. Since many of these individuals think of themselves as “patriots” in Germany, searching for this term might lead to some initial results on VK.

Et voilà, the first VK-group to investigate. As you can see, this group also cites a Facebook-page. However, the Facebook-presence has been deleted and does not exist anymore. Going through the posts on this page and having a look at the members clearly shows that we are on the right track. Below are profile pictures of some of the members. Many images shown here, such as the swastika, are banned by law in Germany. Yet, on VK German citizens are free to display their ideology without any notable repercussions.

While the information posted within the VK-Group “German Patriots” might not lead to real extremist sites, the information shared by members of the group on their personal profiles could get us there. With no way of automating the next step, one of the most important OSINT traits is now needed: perseverance. This means we will have look at a number of these personal profiles manually to find new leads. Instead of going through all 2000+ member-profiles, let us concentrate on the ones with the most disturbing profile pictures. One interesting aspect during this investigation, is the fact that many people that can be found here have Russian-ancestry. This means we might also find information on another Russian social platform called Odnoklassniki (short: OK). Keep this in mind when conducting OSINT on people of Russian origin.

It doesn’t take long and we find hints towards the use of other platforms and communication channels outside of VK. Some individuals have posted their Skype-usernames, some link Telegram channels. One post from January 2018 describes an independent message board outside of Facebook and VK. The author invites people to join this outside platform by commenting or liking the post, after which he will get in contact with them and invite them to the newly created site. Interestingly, he doesn’t disclose the name or URL of his VK and Facebook alternative.

The author hasn’t publicly been active on VK since this post, although he did access it just two days ago. VK displays the last time of user activity, a useful feature to determine if the account is still active, even if nothing is publicly posted.

Regarding the unspecified platform mentioned above, I remembered stumbling upon such a site while conducting a similar search on Facebook. There I had also started by looking for profiles and pages containing derivations of “patriot”. This led me to a page called “Patrioten-Treff”, promoting a Facebook-like platform.

It turns out that this project started in early or mid-2017 and by December 2017/January 2018 it had opened to public. It was exactly the type of right-wing extremist forum I was looking for.

Online shops, racist discussions, team speak servers, organized events; “Patrioten-Treff” had it all. By linking the information I had found on VK and Facebook, it is likely that the person I had come across on VK was actually part of the team behind this new right-wing social media alternative. By early 2019 it was offline, but the content displayed there was more radical than anything seen on standard social media. Regarding the reason it shut down, it could be out of lack of funding. Before “Patrioten-Treff” was taken down, they requested funding to cover the expenses. Payment could be made by Bitcoin, direct transfer, Alipay and Paypal. Again, providing further leads to conduct OSINT investigations.

Patrioten-Treff had 2,500 users and was not even able to raise 80 Euros a month. I guess right-wing extremists are a bit stingy. Next to financial support, content moderators were needed. These moderators would communicate using WhatsApp.

While Patrioten-Treff is currently offline, the Facebook-page continues to be active every once and while. A recent post from September 2019 shared a Telegramm channel of the German neo-Nazi party Der III. Weg.

In this cross-domain investigation, manually searching for information on one social media platform led us to a plethora of new starting points to dive into. From VK to Skype, from Facebook to Telegram, from Bitcoin to WhatsApp; there are now plenty of leads to follow up upon. Not all leads can be investigated with OSINT, but this type of intelligence might provide the information we need to conduct Virtual HUMINT (VUMINT), enabling an infiltration of the new message board, Telegram channels or WhatsApp groups. I didn’t go that far, but I’m sure someone or some organization did.

By the way, the methodology described above can also be used to track other extremist groups. I wonder if other groups are just as cheap as the right-wing that couldn’t raise 80 Euros to host a website?

MW-OSINT / 01.12.2019

Communications Security on Iron March – An Intelligence Analysis

How do right-wing extremists secure their communications? The recent Iron March data leak gives insight into how its members tried to communicate outside the message board.

The recent leakage of a massive white supremacist message board named Iron March sparked a wave of independent investigations by people all of over the world. The data contained in this leak provides many leads to practice OSINT skills in various disciplines. Whether it is googling usernames, correlating email addresses to social media profiles or looking up information on some of the domains shared on this message board; the breached data is a starting point for a plethora of different OSINT methods. Of course, I couldn’t resist and also took a dive into this leak as well! I decided to have a look at the content that was posted on Iron March. Not so much OSINT here, it is more general intelligence analysis I will be applying. One of the challenges was actually defining a clear goal. What did I want to unravel here? Did I want to reconstruct organizational structures? Did I want to investigate individuals and their backgrounds? Did I want to look at certain events?

Without narrowly defined intelligence requirements and thus key intelligence questions that should be answered, approaching such a big amount of data in a methodological way is nearly impossible. After reading the first couple of Iron March messages, I realized that the users often discussed others means of communication outside of the message board. So, I decided that my first goal would be to analyze the communications, security measures and the evolution of communications within this network. Having a better understanding of this topic will surely help the OSINT community to understand where to look for further information during this investigation.

When Iron March was set up, many users migrated from a previous platform called ITPF. Background information on both platforms can be found here. The first posts on Iron March clearly showed, that the users would regularly communicate outside of the message board as well. Among the these outside channels were mainly Skype, MSN, AIM and Facebook.

“You should download Skype it is a good service. Also you can use it just like MSN; you can type, I type most of the time.” Post on 23.09.2011 by Kacen (ID2)

“Not sure if you’re interested but I thought I’d ask, I’m launching a study group for American Fascism/Nationalism quite soon via facebook.” Post on 24.11.2011 by American_Blackshirt (ID35)

Eventually, members of Iron March even set up Skype groups to ensure communications. This enabled them to communicate directly with each other without delay, as it would have been on Iron March. At the time, Skype appeared secure to the members of the message board and was soon the preferred outside communication channel. Occasionally, other channels would also be used to communicate, sometimes even including gaming platforms.

“We have a good number of people in the Skype group and you should join.” Post on 25.01.2011 by Blood and Iron (ID3)

“do you have facebook, or steam, bf3 battlelog or something where us 2 can converse?” Post on 02.07.2012 by unkown

The main reason people would use external messengers to communicate, was that they were more practical than using Iron March’s private messaging system. To gain access to Iron March PMs, the site had to be open in the browser. MSN and other messengers were client-based and could run in the background, immediately informing users of incoming messages. By late 2012, AIM and MSN were also still used frequently, something that would soon change after Microsoft discontinued MSN as a service in 2013.

“Hobbit, do you have MSN? A lot more practical than talking through PMs.” Post on 27.06.2012 by Damnatio Memoriae (ID279)

“Alright, I’ll get back to you again tomorrow, with my AIM, MSN, and SKYPE info.“ Post on 10.10.2012 by social_justice (ID17)

As early as mid 2012, many users were slowly turning away from Facebook, stating privacy issues as their main reason.

“I don’t use facebook anymore, it gives too much information away even if you use a proxy and false information, it’s an easy way to keep a “paper trail” on someone, so to speak.” Post on 03.07.2012 by Nebuchadnezzar II (ID288)

The use of external channels remained mostly unchanged until 2015, when new messaging and chat services started to appear on Iron March. Telegram and Tox were among the most popular services and were viewed as more secure than Skype. This also led to the exchange of Tox IDs, so the members could identify each other on the chat application.

“I need to get in contact with you. Download Tox and make an account with a secure login.” Post on 08.08.2015 by Fascism=Fun (ID7962)

“Another thing I wanna recommend is to use Telegram or Tox instead of Skype for organisational procedures and meetings. These are really good ways of communicating, and I know of three NatSoc and Fascist organisations within the U.S that use these services because of their security.” Post on 05.02.2016 by TheWeissewolfe (ID9304)

The post above is actually from the deputy leader of the infamous Atomwaffen Division. Whenever someone was interested in joining this organization, they were told to use Tox or Telegram for further communications. However, there was still a reasonable amount of doubt regarding the security of these new communication channels. Discussions about adding an extra layer of encryption ensued.

“Yeah I’m well aware the skype is compromised. Literally everything Microsoft is and has been for over a decade. Tox isn’t but it’s a WIP. Discord I don’t know much about but no doubt it is too. Secure channels aren’t really possible without doing your own encryption.” Post on 21.05.2016 by Xav (ID9476)

While most members of Iron March were very naïve in terms of operational security or communications security, some members had a fairly good understanding of the risks in open communications. One of these members was Atlas (ID9174), who claimed to be responsible for network and computer security for the British group National Action.

“Hi, I’m in charge of computer and online network security with National Action.” Post on 23.08.2015 by Atlas (ID9174)

Atlas often provided guidance on the use of secure emails and encryption with PGP. Overall, members were made aware not to use Hushmail and to rely on Protonmail or Tutonota instead. When sending emails to other providers they were to use PGP. He even wrote a PGP guide for National Action and distributed it on Iron March as well.

“Good job I just designed a PGP guide for National Action then, I’ll email you it, what’s your email?” Post on 01.09.2015 by Atlas (ID9174)

Other activities included checking the security of hosting servers. One of the most interesting conversations I have found in this dump so far was between Atlas and the founder and leader of the Atomwaffen Division, Odin. In September 2015, Odin reached out to Atlas regarding issues with PGP.

“Hello comrade I need to have my pgp shit setup properly and to be able to use it for communications with certain people before this weekend. I would be very greatful if you could help me.” Post on 14.09.2015 by Odin (ID7600)

Although many security measures were put in place, a lot of members of Iron March still were fairly confident that their activities had not drawn the attention of law enforcement yet. Some even openly expressed their total negligence of security openly on the message board. There was more fear of being doxed by left-wing organizations than becoming a target of police investigations.

“I’m glad you all understood the necessity for security. Here on IM I was shot down for daring to suggest such a necessity on the basis of: We don’t need it, we’re not ISIS. I ripped off all my ideas from some corny website anyway (that website being my blog btw lol).” Post on 04.05.2015 by Atlas (ID9174)

“The use of TOR, fake names, and these secure channels is more of security culture thing – we are not being actively monitored by say, the government (at least that is my personal opinon based on the information I have) but it encourages people to act more sensibly so they don’t get themselves doxed by leftists. I don’t like hearing about workplaces getting phoned up or individuals being exposed in the newspapers. Since the mirror article on my a couple of years ago practically everyone has been able to maintain a degree of anonymity. Obviously if they ever decide to raid anyone they are not going to find anything that can be used to build a case around them.” Post on 10.04.2016 by Daddy Terror (ID7)

Given the fact, that Daddy Terror (ID7) was the leader of the National Action movement in Great Britain, this statement is truly remarkable and shows how safe some of the members of these extremist communities felt in their online communications. Next to the platforms already revealed above, there were several other communications channels that were occasionally mentioned, e.g. Discord and even MySpace in the early days of Iron March. In the end, the use of external secure communications and additional encryption were blasted when the message board itself was hacked in 2017 and the data was recently leaked, exposing the identities and ideas of many members.

Thank god the Iron March admins didn’t have proper security measures in place and hopefully this data leak will help law enforcement worldwide investigate some of the malicious activities planned and discussed on the message board. Until then, I’ll continue to dig into this data, together with other OSINT enthusiasts, and see what stories can be unraveled next.

MW-OSINT / 09.11.2019

OSINT Key Findings in the Year 2009

Syria, nonproliferation sanctions, OSINT, Google Dorks and SIGINT. In 2009, these all came together in an interesting investigation.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article about my opinion on the future of OSINT and while doing so, I had to think about how OSINT looked in the past and how it has evolved over the years. Gathering and analyzing information, not only through OSINT, has always been my passion and I’ve been doing this for about 20 years now. Just like the recent project with Sector035, where we unraveled a massive scam network, I have often conducted research on specific topics purely out of curiosity. These side projects were never work related, but the skills I then learned were eventually useful throughout my career. Often, reading a simple news article would send me down a rabbit hole. From looking up related news articles to spending hours on Wikipedia to creating link charts, largescale investigations were always only a mouse-click away.

I just recently recalled a project I worked on in early 2009. It all started with me looking into various nonproliferation sanctions lists. I think it was a news article that sparked my interest. These sanctions were and are imposed on countries that have been accused of trying to procure and/or produce weapons of mass destruction, e.g. nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. I started looking into government and non-government entities from Syria on those lists. Remember, this was back in 2009. There weren’t really many sophisticated OSINT tools back then, so most findings resulted from simple Google queries.

One of the entities I looked at was the Mechanical Construction Factory. Googling this led to millions of results, so I narrowed it down by adding quotation marks: “Mechanical Construction Factory”. My next step was looking for this search term in specific filetypes. PDF or Powerpoint documents have the tendency to contain more relevant information than your average webpage. Adding the filetype-operator in Google led to some rather interesting results.

For example, the Greek Exporters Association (SEVE) posted monthly spreadsheets of tenders originating from Syria. These lists contained information on who requested the offer (including addresses, phone numbers and email-addresses), as well as goods they were seeking to acquire.

In order to find all tender spreadsheets on this page, I again used Google dorks. Combining the site-operator with the filetype-operator brought up all the PDFs saved in the 2008 directory. Since I only wanted to look at the PDFs for Syria, I used Google Translate to obtain the Greek spelling of Syria, as each spreadsheet had this somewhere in the document. The final query looked like this:

I now had a long list of Syrian companies that had requested to purchase goods from Greece. Not only that, multiple companies used the same phone numbers, so I could assume that they were linked to each other in some way. I recall finding one or two companies that were linked to a sanctioned company by a phone number and that weren’t listed themselves.

Playing around with Google dorks had me find plenty of interesting material to go through. While I can still reproduce the example mentioned above (just try it yourself), the most interesting finding in this case is unfortunately lost.

Back then, Turkey had a government organization named “Undersecretariat for Defence Industries”. The Turkish abbreviation of this was SSM. The SSM-website doesn’t exist anymore, as the organization was renamed and restructured in 2018 (as SSB). This organization posted roughly 150 scanned original tenders from Syria on their website. While not directly accessible through a dedicated page, using the Google dorks had them appear in my queries. These documents contained phone numbers, addresses, signatures and seals that were stamped on the paper. Apparently, they were sent to Turkey in hardcopy or scanned and then sent electronically.

Keep in mind, I did all this at home. This was my hobby and not related to my actual line of work. I was a SIGINTer, not an OSINTer at work, tasked with a completely different area of operations. However, these original documents seemed like something my colleagues working on Syria would also be interested in. I took an example of one of the tender documents to work one day and showed it to the guys at the Syria desk. They could not believe that I had just found this online. Some of them where even convinced that I had access to their data and pulled it from there. I ended up directing them to all the documents I had discovered on the aforementioned Turkish site and they proved to compliment the knowledge the Syria desk already had.

While writing this article, I tried to find the those documents using the Wayback Machine, but as I previously mentioned they weren’t actually located on a site that could be easily accessed. So, they unfortunately weren’t archived. I went through the complete site map in the Wayback Machine with no luck. For those of you who don’t know this function, try it out. It is great to get an overview of the structure of a historic webpage.

In 2009, many people underestimated the power of OSINT. In 2019, I don’t think many people will make that mistake again. No fancy tools were needed back then, just some Google dorks and perseverance to manually go through hundreds of PDFs. Although things have changed in the OSINT world and continue to change as we move along, I am sure there is still plenty of juicy information that can be found on the internet by just mastering the use of Google operators. Happy hunting, fellow OSINTers!

MW-OSINT / 27.09.2019

Social media is dead, long live social media!

Is your intelligence target under 25 and not on Facebook? You might want to check the social media that kids nowadays are actually using!

My daughter always says: “Dad, Facebook is for old people!” It’s true, I’ve noticed that many people under the age of 25 aren’t on ‘traditional’ social media anymore. They are not on Facebook and they may give a confused look if confront them MySpace, GooglePlus or walkmans.

So, how and where do you find Generation Z on social media. Clearly, they still feel the urge to express themselves on the internet and they’re still out there, but mostly not with their real names. This makes OSINT much more challenging. On Facebook we could search for real names, we could search by phone number and in some cases we could find people through email addresses. Some of these techniques work on other social media platforms, some won’t. In any case, if you find a profile linked to one of your targets, you might come across further social media profiles that your intelligence target has backlinked on the one you have found.

I’ve noticed that many young people use TikTok, an app designer to share short music videos. It contains likes, friends and comments, similar to what we know from ‘traditional’ social media. Luckily, the TikTok app allows you to find profiles linked to phone numbers. For this, you need to install the app either on your burner phone or in an AndroidVM, then go to the profile page and tap the ‘add contact’ button on the top left. The red dot indicates that new contacts have been found.

Next up, choose the option in the middle, stating that would like to find contacts from your phone book. This of course means you have to add the phone numbers of your intelligence targets to the phone book first and give TikTok access to it.

Tapping ‘find contacts’ will show the amount of phone numbers that are linked to TikTok accounts and it also gives you the choice to follow them. It looks like some of my contacts are actually using TikTok.

If you have a nickname, even one derived from other platforms, these can be looked up in the app itself too. TikTok will only allow you to search for the beginning of the nickname and not for parts in the middle or last portion of the name. In the following screenshot I looked for nicknames containing ‘James’ and I was only shown names starting with ‘James’. The reason this is relevant, is that I have often found TikTok accounts to use prefixes or suffixes on their regular nicknames. So instead of just ‘James’, you might find the user as ‘xyz.james’ or ‘james.1982’.

However, there is a workaround for this. Just like with Instagram, there are many sites that scrape TikTok and display the accounts and in many cases the content as well. One of the ones I like to use is PlayTik. PlayTik allows you to search for hashtags and accounts. Let’s find an account that somehow uses ‘f1nd1ng’ in the nickname.

There we go, two accounts containing the searchterm. Now you can have a look at the profile and check out any videos this profile has uploaded (and publically disclosed). It looks like this particular profile also links to further social media and websites, like I had mentioned before. Plus, the profile contains a video. Feel free to watch it!

Facebook may be fading (soon), but others platforms will replace it. Thus: Social media is dead, long live social media! The new platforms are not just for young people, so go and try them out (research them) yourselves!

MW-OSINT / 13.09.2019