Technisette's Tips & Tricks - #002

Welcome to number 2!

In this newsletter, you’ll find some helpful tips and tricks for your OSINT investigations. The insights shared here are based on my personal experiences over the last month.

Have fun reading!

I like AI in many ways. But what I really find annoying is that whenever I use Google, it shows me AI results immediately. And I know I’m not the only one who’s getting annoyed by this. Craig Silverman shared a great tip on LinkedIn about this (read here).
By adding ‘&udm=14’ at the end of your search URL (or selecting the ‘Web’ results) you can remove the AI results. Or just add ‘-ai’ in the search bar.
Now you can happily use Google without an AI generated answer at the top.

Google has announced that Gmail-owners will be allowed to change their username once a year. And the old username will be kept to make sure you won’t miss any emails sent to your old email.
This is currently only available for people in the US but the option will be more wider available later.
But did you know there is already a way to ‘change’ your username? You can add letters/numbers to your Gmail username and still receive emails. To do this, you need to add a ‘+’ at the end of your username, followed by whatever it is you want to add.
For example; if my Gmail were gsdure23@gmail.com, I can send emails to gsdure23+substack@gmail.com, which would land in the same inbox.
This can be helpful for a ton of reasons. For example if you want an email address focused on receiving newsletters > gsdure23+newsletter@gmail.com > and you create a rule where any email sent to this address will land in a special folder.

Nowadays finding people can be quite difficult. Especially because the next generation is being taught to not always sign up with their real name. So finding someone through their email and/or phone number, is a way to get closer to your target.
Syncing your contacts (from phone or email) with a platform is a way to find out if someone is active on the platform or not. I recently discovered that the language learning app Duolingo also offers contact syncing and shows which contacts are on the platform too. So don’t forget this app when you’re doing your contact exploitation!

Reading about the add-on made for extracting data from VK (see below), made me want to share an oldie but goodie; Instant Data Scraper
Instant Data Scraper is a Chrome add-on to help you scrape data of a page. For example; if a Facebook friend list is not too long (no more than roughly 300) you can scrape the list into an Excel file easily. Or open an Instagram-post in a new tab and scrape the comments of that post.
It doesn’t cure all of the scraping challenges, but it sure helps a lot!

After publishing this newsletter it was brought to my attention that Instant Data Scraper had recently changed ownership. This made fellow OSINT-er Micah Hoffman investigated Instant Data Scrapers new owner. He found out that the add-on is accessing more data then before.
If you have installed Instant Data Scraper in your browser, uninstall immediately to prevent a third party lurking in your browser.
More information can be found in Micah’s LinkedIn-post.

A next step from scraping data is that you of course want to compare the data. Those of you who are creative in Excel or use analytic software, can easily do that. But if you struggle to find a good method of comparing, Kirby Plessas is here to help you out! She created a ChatGPT agent called Friend Overlap Tool where you upload your scraped content in (or just screenshots) and your overlapping friends will appear there!.

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I’ve been working on a Snapchat course for the My OSINT Training platform (and it’s nearly finished!). And I’ve been exploring all kinds of search techniques.
My favourite so far; backmoji. Backmoji helps you retrieve older versions of Bitmoji’s used on a profile. Luckily; Backmoji is now available as a browser bookmarklet!

VK, for those who haven’t heard too much about it, is a sort of Facebook focused on mostly Russian people. And just like Facebook, VK holds a lot of information about people.
If your target is present on VK, you might want to fetch all of their content there. And the add-on built by OSINTersect can help you do just that. In their blog they also shared a video on how it works and what data can be extracted. Their add-on can be downloaded from GitHub here.

I think the whole world is watching Australia implementing the social media ban for under 16. And of course this will have its effect on OSINT.
Not only will if be even harder to create new profiles but it will also be harder to find targets which are younger than 16.
That’s why I’m looking forward to attending OSINTcombine’s webinar on April 15th, which they announced on their LinkedIn. You can register for free and if the time is inconvenient, you can rewatch the recording on a later moment.
You can register here.

Are you keen on OSINT and/or social engineering? Well lucky you! On June 4 and 5 the Layer 8 conference will be held in Boston, US.
Not only will you see amazing speakers there, there is also an opportunity to take my class there! Together with Micah Hoffman we’ll host a 2-day course and teach you the finest of OSINT. Check out the deal (which includes a free ticket!) here!

For the first time the SANS OSINT Summit is coming to Amsterdam!
With one day filled with workshops (June 15th) and one day filled with presentations (June 16th), it’s guaranteed to be something you don’t want to miss.
And I’m personally very excited to announce that I’ll be the keynote speaker on the 16th. During my talk I’ll walk you through by biggest mistakes which are my best experiences now because I learned so much from them.
Will I see you there? I got some really nice OSINT stickers to hand out!
Get your tickets here!

I hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter! Check out previous newsletters here.

If you have any tips, tricks, or recommendations, feel free to reach out to me!

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