In April 2024 I finally managed to achieve the professional development goal that I set for myself after leaving the government job of over 12 years in law enforcement – to get ISC2 CISSP certified. That was in 2019, so nearly 5 years later (the main obstacle being procrastination) the achievement was unlocked. This is the main reason why no new content was published on the blog in March – the CISSP preparation was a priority and the last leg of the study journey had to be as free as possible from distractions. So to give something back to the wider infosec community, here are some subjectiv ..read more

“The Wordfence Web Application Firewall has blocked 467 attacks over the last 10 minutes. Wordfence is blocking these attacks, and we’re sending this notice to make you aware that there is a higher volume of attacks than usual.” If it’s your first time to have received an email like this, it can cause your heart to skip a beat or two. But you shouldn’t really worry and honestly, there isn’t much you can do anyway. This message is proof that Wordfence, your friendly WAF for your WordPress blog, is working as intended. This blog post will focus on some of the most common types of attacks I ..read more

Over 2 years I wrote this blog post on opsec and privacy fails when doing OSINT. Basically a list of examples (practical, not theoretical) of what could go wrong and how it could damage or impede your investigation. Today’s post might as well be read in conjunction with the old one. It was triggered by some recent discussions and reading on various legal (and illegal, or at least borderline) aspects of OSINT. Let me explain what I mean by it. All OSINT is legal, it's open source & openly available. Right? Generally yes and it’s a universal truth that all OSINT practitioners globally ac ..read more

A file containing breached or leaked data of over 28.000 people living in Ireland has recently surfaced on one of the clearnet data leaks forums. Now, as far as breach records go, this one is a very structured and clean Excel file containing email addresses, names, surnames, general locations and phone numbers. Usually data dump files are bulky and messy, which is not the case here. But, first things first. This research was initiated after an anonymous tip off from a reader. A big thank you is owed to the person who flagged this to me – and a big thank you is hereby expressed. The dump f ..read more

The topic of blocking ads with uBlock Origin is timely, given the recent announcement from Google on how it’s going to prevent uBlock and other ad blocker extensions from working correctly in Chrome, starting June 2024 onwards. While Firefox users will not be affected, most of us still run uBlock with its default configuration. So it seems like now is a good time to talk about customising this configuration and level up our content blocking game, for maximum privacy. Clicking on the extension itself and clicking on the cogs icon opens up a Settings menu. Here we can navigate to Default b ..read more

Reading obituaries and death notices to dig for information sounds like an old school espionage thing – and it is. It was part of intelligence collection tradecraft long before the term OSINT was coined. Whether you are a genealogy researcher, a private investigator, a general enthusiast of the past or a casual Halloween OSINT hobbyist, you are nearly guaranteed to expand your investigative scope using some of the approaches described here. The example below was taken from a genuine obituary, with personal information redacted – but nevertheless it should give you an idea of the wealth of d ..read more

Today’s focus is on over 15 online tools that enable finding people by face matching. A topic probably more relevant now than a year or so ago, due to the proliferation of AI, which could make the task of finding somebody online both easier and more confusing (see deepfakes). And certainly a large portion of the OSINT market that just keeps on growing. Traditional reverse images searching using popular search engines has been producing consistently poor results if you search for persons other than known celebrities or those whose photos are available in every corner of the Internet. Face rec ..read more

What are ports and what is port scanning? Before getting into the proverbial weeds, let’s explain the basic concepts. Ports are nothing else but logical (not physical) communication gateways that allow the flow of information between two or more machines on a network. Port scanning – also sometimes referred to as network scanning – is a type of passive reconnaissance used mainly by cybersecurity professionals to determine the level of a vulnerability of a given network. Port scanning is conducted by sending series of messages from one computer to another, one message at the time to each port ..read more

Big announcement & update folks – Osint Me is now officially expanding into the realm of training, education and development. Check below for more details. The last several weeks were busy with speaking engagements in public and private settings, including third level institutions and non-profits. Most notable however was the partnership with the Local Enterprise Office and the delivery of business training programs on ransomware & cybercrime prevention for small and medium enterprise. Ransomware is a huge problem both in Ireland and globally and the average cost of a single ransom ..read more

Despite numerous darknet markets and vendors being taken down or going offline in the last 6 – 8 months, there has not been any major change to the darkweb OSINT resources since the publication of the most recent list of resources. Most of the links listed there should work without any issues (famous last words, I know…). At the same time, I decided to supplement our existing sources with several additions that I collected over time. So here they are. NOTE: The indexer services like those pasted below operate by listing links collected by bots and scrapers. The whole process is automated ..read more