Ever-Evolving Business Model Almost everything in our lives has been fundamentally altered by the internet in the last two decades, including the way we buy and sell each other. Technology has reduced the risks and costs of criminal activities across jurisdictions through social media and online marketplaces, mobile payments, digital currencies, and advanced software. Criminals, such as human traffickers, are using technology to expand human trafficking further and faster by using human beings as commodities. They take advantage of social media to recruit victims, gain access to an unlimited ..read more

What is Organ Trafficking? Organ trafficking is a highly illegal and unethical activity that involves the buying and selling of organs for transplantation. It is typically organized by criminal networks that operate outside of the law and seek to profit from the desperation of those in need of organ transplants. The complexity of organ trafficking can vary depending on the specific context and circumstances involved. In some cases, it may involve relatively simple transactions between a buyer and seller, while in other cases it may involve a more elaborate network of brokers, middlemen, and m ..read more

The major defence that has kept the US government from banning TikTok is human rights and civil liberties. Over the past few weeks, news of a threatened TikTok ban has taken over the internet. The US government has been pressing down hard on the Chinese-owned social media company, and the issue has raised many questions all over the internet. The back and forth between TikTok and the US government has delivered more memes than questions. This article will give answers to as many questions as it can. Well, to properly understand the situation, we need to understand the root of the case: open s ..read more

Some individuals have been at the battlefront, releasing the most explicit details about the war through social media, except that they aren't at the battlefront but are OSINT amateurs flexing their espionage skills. The crisis in Ukraine has been a hot topic, with the most detailed updates pouring in through TikTok videos, Tweets, and even Facebook posts. However, amidst the flood of information, concerns have been raised about the disclosure of highly sensitive information, particularly during a war, and has sparked debates about the necessity of OSINT. Suit up, as we dive into the darker s ..read more

There's been lots of tears lately because divisive billionaire VoldeMusk has completed his acquisition of Twitter and has begun making some bold changes. Personally, I'm "meh" on the subject but I have created a new Twitter account to watch events unfold.  One of the most controversial changes has been the introduction of verification for paying users through Twitter Blue reducing otherwise "verified" users to the same status as average users. Musk's plan, according to his tweets - which seem to vary wildly day by day - was to verify users via a payment method and therefore reduce the ri ..read more

Quite often I get a new case to investigate and it's a young social media user with no Facebook, no Twitter, just TikTok, with that in mind I thought I would outline the steps I take to run targeted OSINT investigations on TikTok. In Part one we focus on the USER. TikTok was the second most downloaded app in 2019. 800 millions of people worldwide use the “[…] Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming”. I don’t get why and that’s one of the many reasons I realize I am getting old. Whatever. Setup TikTok was desig ..read more

You've been running queries on your data collection for a long time, but what if I told you that your system can also be queried in this manner? Let's not rush through the dull part: depending on your operating system and distribution, you can only perform select statements on particular tables. Osquery is a cross-platform agent developed by Facebook, that "kind of" convert your system into a relational database where you can ask questions in the syntax of SQL queries. For example, here is a simple query to get a list of username and home directory all the users. SELECT username, directory F ..read more

Welcome to the first part of my series on Mastodon, which focuses on gathering open-source intelligence from the platform, its instances, and its users. Before we dive into Mastodon and start mining OSINT, lets first take a close look at the platform itself from a technical perspective. An Introduction To Mastodon Mastodon is an open-source microblogging platform similar to Twitter on the surface, but it is radically different in terms of its decentralized architecture. First released in 2016, it was developed by a German software developer “Eugen Rochko". This platform is of interest to the ..read more

SIM swap fraud is an increasingly widespread means for hackers to steal access to your phone number and then your identity. This kind of fraud is so successful because it is designed specifically to target the widespread default security measures that are supposed to protect you. In this article, we will explain how a hacker can SIM swap almost any phone number and how you can keep safe. Why Your Phone is the Gateway to Your Identity Your phone number is often the gateway to stealing access to your money and your identity. After the hacker takes your phone number, they can log into your email ..read more

Russia is the biggest country in the world, and because of that, it has one of the biggest railway systems in the world which is hugely important to almost every facet of Russian life. Russia is so big that it has different types of climate zones, spread across vast regions and its economy relies heavily on the export of natural resources, making trains a critical part of the country's public infrastructure. Railway Basics Constructing railways is complicated, everybody wants to be on time and be able to drive anywhere they please in a short amount of time. People take trains for visiting oth ..read more