Ho-Ho-Hosint

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques

What is OSINT?

OSINT is data collected from publicly available sources to be used in an intelligence context. For an attacker to run a phishing campaign, he first needs to gather knowledge about the individual being targeted.

The OSINT framework is a collection of resources and tools we can use for our intelligence gathering.

In this challenge, there will be three main OSINT techniques, which are as follows:

Image Metadata

Image metadata is text information that is pertaining to an image file, that is embedded into the file.

This data includes details relevant to the image itself as well as the information about its production. For example, if we take a photo in the park, our smartphone will attach GPS location metadata to the image.

Image Metadata can also include camera details, such as aperture, shutter speed and DPI.. it can also include the creator (author) or the individual taking the image.

Exiftool is a free and open-source program for reading metadata on files.

WayBack Machine

The WayBackMachine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web. It takes a snapshot of a website and saves it for us to view in the future. This can be used to gather information regarding how a website used to look.

Reverse Image Search

Google lets us search the internet for an image we have.

If a user has a profile picture of themselves on one social media, its most likely they have re-used the same photo on lots of other different social media sites. We can take that one image, search all other sites for that image and identify where that user has also signed up.

It can also be used to identify who or what is in a image.

By using exiftool we get the image creator name

Using google to find a social media account with that user name takes us to a twitter account

Using the WayBack Machine we can search for snapshots of Lola's wordpress website. The first snapshot dates to the 23rd of October of 2019, and there Lola states that she started her photography 5 years before on that same date.

By uploading the picture on google we can find out that the famous woman is Ada Lovelace.