The OSINT Newsletter - Issue #32
Manipulating website registration forms to collect open source information about an email address
👋 Welcome to the 32nd issue of The OSINT Newsletter. This issue contains OSINT news, community posts, tactics, techniques, and tools to help you become a better investigator. This issue is very OPSEC-heavy. Operational Security (OPSEC) is an essential tradecraft every investigator must learn in order to stay safe while investigating online.
🚨 Over 100 people have pre-ordered the print issue of The OSINT Newsletter. That’s an amazing milestone. By the time this newsletter is published, I will have completed the initial draft of the community portion of the print issue. What remains is the category-specific workflows that I will add that are print exclusives.
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OSINT News
📰 🥸 Access Location, Camera & Microphone of any Device
Be careful out there. There are a lot of tools that exist to unmask your identity online. You can use these as an investigator if the situation warrants it; however, in most scenarios, these tools will be used against you. This article is about Storm-Breaker, a powerful social engineering tool that allows hackers to access the victim’s location, camera, microphone, and IP address.
📰 🥸 How to Track Realtime Location of ANY Telegram User — 2 Methods
Telegram is a very popular messaging app. It has many features aimed at providing a better user experience for their users. Those features, though, sometimes come at a cost. This article talks about the “Find People Nearby” feature, the risks it presents, and how an investigator can use it to track the location of any user. It also offers you a defensive plan to avoid this exposure from impacting you.
📰 🥸 Debunking the Myth of “Anonymous” Data
This article is an interesting read from a digital privacy and OSINT perspective. Not only does it go through and define several different data points and how easily accessible that information is, but it also talks about how that information is accessed and by whom. How is personally identifiable information (PII) stored? How is it accessed? What’s the catch?
Read on Electronic Frontier Foundation…
📰 The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story
This is a very long article, so strap in. It tells the story of the 2016 internet outages of Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, PayPal, Slack, and more as well as the people behind it. If you’re a fan of Darknet Diaries, this will be an entertaining read. But why in The OSINT Newsletter?
The journey of how cybercriminals go from zero to criminal is important context when doing investigations into eCrime or similar. That context is what gives you the power to pivot when others can’t.
🗒️ Wired paywalled the post. I’ve added a Wayback Machine link below.
📰 🥸 An Ultimate List of Rules Net Survivors Should Follow to Stay Safe!
If you’re new to OSINT or have found yourself slipping in your OPSEC compliance, give this article a read. It’s a great refresher on how to set up the proper environment to stay safe online and in public. It even extends into cryptocurrency.
OSINT Tools
🔎 TikTokPy
This tool allows you to extract data from TikTok without needing any login information or API keys. Think of it like an unofficial API for TikTok. You can fetch video information, creator information, download video libraries, etc.
🥸 Your Social Media Fingerprint
This is not only a tool you can use to improve your OPSEC, but it also presents an interesting idea. In a nutshell, websites behave differently depending on whether or not you’re logged in to them. This is especially true for the redirect process. Give this tool a try to learn more about a variety of topics.
🖥️ Alfred 5
Alfred is a research powerhouse. It does automation, Google Fu, expands the clipboard functionality (clipboard history), keyboard shortcuts, enhances file management, runs terminal, and more. I’m likely going to add their Workflow’s functionality to my terminal tools to run multiple Python scripts on a certain data point, for example.
💰 This is a paid tool; however, it offers a one-time purchase price.
🥸 Extension Detector
Similar to Your Social Media Fingerprint, Extension Detector uses your online digital fingerprint to detect which browser extensions you have installed. Both of these tools had me thinking about what could be accomplished with a spoofed digital fingerprint. Use this for OPSEC and to kick off some research around digital fingerprinting.
🖥️ 🥸 Telex
The final OPSEC-related tool in this issue is Telex. Think of Telex like a honeypot generator. If you’ve seen tools like Bitly, this is similar; however, Telex is specifically designed for threat intelligence research. Plant one of these seeds (ethically) in a place where a certain audience will find it and see what happens. Alternatively, study what’s possible to improve your own OPSEC.
OSINT Community
📺 OSINT at Home #22: How To Measure Areas Using Free Satellite Tools
This is an amazing video. Ben shows you how you can use certain tools to measure satellite imagery. From calculating the area of wildfire damage to measuring the length of a ship, you can use built-in tools to gather open source information manually.
📘 Detection Engineering Weekly
Detection Engineering Weekly is an OSINT Newsletter recommended read. If you’re in the world of cyber threat intelligence, asset identification, or detection engineering, this is a great publication to subscribe to. Check out their latest issue.
🐦 How to verify leak data
There’s a lot of leaked data out there for free and for sale. When there’s financial gain involved, there’s always the possibility of fraud. In this article, Techjournalist shows you how you can investigate leaked data to ensure it’s the real deal.
📘 Bullsh*t Hunting
In this issue of Bullsh*t Hunting, Justin shows how you can scrape SSL certs using Google Sheets. This is a great introduction to how you can build a no-code web scraper for small scraping tasks.
🐦 MetaOSINT will push a major update
MetaOSINT is a huge directory of resources for open source intelligence. It’s been a while since it’s been updated but a major update is coming soon. Make sure to bookmark the page and look out for the update when it comes out.
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⚡Manipulating website registration forms to collect open source information about an email address
We’ll look at three examples that target three use cases:
Discord
OnlyFans
NameCheap
🏴 Objective: Determine if an email address is registered on either of these websites to confirm other information we already know (chat activity, potential infidelity, WHOIS data, etc.).
👀 You get access to all paid posts in the archive. Go back and see what you’ve missed!
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