April 19, 2018
On 18 April 2018 Syrian Archive and Knack revealed information that Belgium violated EU sanctions against Syria according to the summons of an upcoming lawsuit. The Belgian customs found that without having requested the appropriate export licenses three Flemish companies have exported 96 tonnes of isopropanol in a concentration of 95% or higher to Syria…
February 10, 2018
Following a Bellingcat workshop, a group of investigative journalists from the Dutch public broadcaster KRO-NCRV spent the last six months investigating social media platforms used by the Dutch National Police Force. After analyzing data and footage from YouTube videos, tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts, we reached the following conclusion: Dutch police are sometimes careless with…
November 13, 2017
You can read the original blogpost by Fiete Stegers, on which this article was based, here. Where exactly was a photo on Twitter taken? When was a Facebook video recorded? Is that image fake, or authentic? These are just some of the common questions you can face when verifying social media content. A few months ago, Julia…
October 27, 2017
Introduction In June we published on a previously unknown group we named “Bahamut,” a strange campaign of phishing and malware apparently focused on the Middle East and South Asia. In the Bahamut report, we documented a capable actor interested in a diverse set of political, economic, and non-governmental targets, which suggested espionage rather than criminal…
April 19, 2017
Internet shutdowns happen – more frequently than we often hear. An impressive 56 countrywide shutdowns were documented in 2016, according to Access Now’s campaign #KeepItOn, which also defines a shutdown as “an intentional disruption of internet or electronic communications, rendering them inaccessible or effectively unusable, for a specific population or within a location, often to exert control over the flow of information.”
March 10, 2017
Over the last two months, increased shelling in and around industrial sites north of Donetsk have, apart from the direct civilian casualties costs, posed huge public health and environmental risks. Apart from the wider environmental impacts caused by targeting industrial sites, on several occasions, Russia-backed forces have hit various water treatment stations. These facilities host…
January 11, 2016
One frequent issue encountered by anyone working with user generated content is the misattribution of videos and photographs, something that can occur for a number of reasons. With the conflicts in Syria and Iraq many shocking videos and photographs are shared online on a variety of platforms, and it’s very important to anyone interested in…
December 22, 2015
By Dan Kaszeta
Wikipedia is used widely as a reference tool. The nature of Wikipedia, however, means that it’s accuracy and reliability can be suspect at times. In the area of chemical and biological weapons, Wikipedia is not optimum. It has proven to be inaccurate in some cases, misleading in others, or containing only part of the story….
December 2, 2015
By Justin Seitz
This post originally appeared on the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. Eliot Higgins had an excellent post where he shows how to grab preview images from YouTube videos and use them for verification, or potentially to find additional sites where that video might be shown or linked to. This technique is called reverse image searching which I have covered…
November 23, 2015
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
On 16 November, three days after the Paris Attacks, the Bellingcat Investigation Team identified the Facebook profile of one of the assailants, Bilal Hadfi. Here is how we did it. In the evening of 13 November, six simultaneous terrorist attacks happened in France’s capital city of Paris. One of these happened in the vicinity of the…
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