As verification and open source investigation techniques and methodologies have been developed over the last few years various tools and platforms have been used to access the information that makes this kind of work possible. This includes pre-existing tools such as Google Earth and new tools developed over the last few years. In this article…
Imagine you are researching an anonymous website with no clues as to its authorship. A single string of code could link that site to another, which perhaps reveals the identity of the owner. With the right tools, this information can be surprisingly easy to uncover. Site fingerprinting with embedded code Google Analytics is a popular…
This was originally posted to the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. There is a very cool game called Her Story. The premise is that you are a cop sitting in front of a 1990s-era computer system that enables you to punch keywords in to view videos about a murder case. When you punch in a keyword, there are…
This article was originally posted to the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. Recently I was listening to an episode of the Freakonomics podcast titled, “Making Sex Offenders Pay – And Pay and Pay” which you can listen tohere. The premise behind the episode was that sex offenders are a bit unique in how they are punished by the…
This article was originally published on AutomatingOSINT.com. After running the first part of this series I had a question come in from Charles Cameron (@hipbonegamer) a well known author and terrorism researcher: Charles Cameron (hipbone) – May 26th, 2015 So — did you draw any conclusions from the use of this technique on the trove…
Этот пост также доступен на русском языке в переводе @Mortis_Banned Bellingcat recently published an in-depth investigation finding that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) fabricated and misrepresented their satellite photographs in a July 21, 2014 press conference, immediately following the July 17 downing of MH17. The most obvious and compelling evidence of this investigation was…
In Bellingcat’s latest report, Forensic Analysis of Satellite Images Released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, we exposed how Russia had falsely claimed satellite imagery from June 2014 was from July 14th and July 17th. As with nearly all of Bellingcat’s work we used open source information, satellite imagery from Google Earth, to expose the fake…
This article was originally posted on Arms Control Wonk. Sadly, there is no textbook for imagery analysis. I would love to contribute to one someday, but until that becomes an option, here’s the March 1996 Unclassified Photo Interpretation Student Handbook. I picked it up from from a rather unusual meeting on a DC trip and…
In the Ukraine conflict, many have scoured the military equipment sightings on social media to find evidence of Russian involvement. One obvious sign to look for is equipment that’s either exclusively used by Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, or has not ever been in manufactured or service in Ukraine. The modernized T-72B3 main battle…
This article was originally published on AutomatingOSINT.com. On May 20, 2015 the ODNI released a trove of documents called “Bin Ladin’s Bookshelf“. This included all kinds of materials including letters he had written, books he was reading and other various bits of information. This document released piqued my interest primarily because I was interested to…
