February 22, 2018
By Aric Toler
Throughout this story, click on any of the images to view in full resolution. When conducting open source investigations, an ever-present issue is how to archive away the materials you are researching. For example, a social media post may be deleted by a user after you publish an investigation, or a video on YouTube showing…
January 29, 2018
By Aric Toler
Recently, the fitness app Strava published a “heatmap” of trillion of data points visualizing the information of users who submitted or synchronized their fitness activity to their servers. This data includes both fitness information recorded directly on the fitness app and data synchronized with the app from a number of physical fitness trackers, such as…
October 17, 2017
By Aric Toler
Much of Bellingcat’s work requires intense research into particular events, which includes finding every possible photograph, video, and witness account that will help inform our analysis. Perhaps most notably, we exhaustively researched the events surrounding the shoot down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over eastern Ukraine. The photographs and videos taking near the crash…
September 15, 2017
By Justin Seitz
This article was originally posted to the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. More and more investigations are being conducted on Tor and many of them can also include investigating Bitcoin transactions. The nature of Bitcoin is such that the transactions themselves are designed to be anonymous but there are many other factors that can dictate whether the owner…
July 31, 2017
By Justin Seitz
This post was originally posted on the AutomatingOSINT.com blog here.A few years ago Lawrence Alexander published a great piece on finding connections between websites using Google Analytics (among others) codes. Last year I had published a post where I taught you how to automatically mine some of this information using Python, and then how to visualize it. Unfortunately the…
June 30, 2017
By Aric Toler
One of the most common issues for researchers and journalists is verifying user-generated video content, most often found on social networks and file sharing platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. There is no silver bullet to verify every video, and it may be nearly impossible to verify some videos short of acquiring…
June 23, 2017
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
The research behind the joint report with Transparency International was only made possible due to the government’s decision in 2014 to make its records available to the public free of charge. Due to the volume of Scottish Limited Partnerships (“SLPs”) incorporated during 2016 this information would have previously cost thousands of pounds. A similar investigation…
April 21, 2017
By Justin Seitz
This article was originally posted on the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. Having an early warning system is an incredibly useful tool in the OSINT world. Being able to monitor search engines and other sites for keywords, IP addresses, document names, or email addresses is extremely useful. This can tell you if an adversary, competitor or a friendly…
February 27, 2017
By Dan Kaszeta
Frequently Asked Questions about VX Nerve Agent (Please contact the author via the comments feature to ask additional questions, which will be answered as time permits) What is VX? VX is a chemical warfare agent. It is part of the family of chemical warfare agents known as the nerve agents, because they affect the chemistry…
December 6, 2016
By Justin Seitz
This article was originally posted at the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. Not long ago I was intrigued by the Oct282011.com Internet mystery (if you haven’t heard of it check out this podcast). Friends of the Hunchly mailing list and myself embarked on a brief journey to see if we could root out any additional clues or, of…
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