Archive for the 'Search Strategies' Category

Searching for Hacked Accounts

I always use the subject’s known email addresses as search terms. I assume that any good Investigator would do the same. However, where you search matters.

Have you ever searched an email address and found that it was compromised? Groups like Anonymous and Lulzsec sometimes post lists of compromised email addresses along with the associated passwords. Do you know where to search for this and how to report it?

“I didn’t post that! My account was hacked!” is a common ‘Weinergate’ inspired excuse. If the Investigator doesn’t make a reasonable effort to search for the possibility of a compromised account, then he may be judged incompetent or negligent.

Without the co-operation of the subject, the Investigator must start an organised search for indications that the email account has been compromised.

Always search for the name of the email service provider and the words ‘hacked’ and ‘compromised’ along with  ‘accounts’ and ‘email’. If you find something, then compare the date of the security breach to the time of your own Weintergate.

Next, search shouldichangemypassword.com, pwnedlist.com, and hacknotifier.com. The first two only tell you if the account might be compromised, while the last one sometimes links the searcher to online information about the security breach.

Of course the Investigator should document the search and explain the sources that were searched.

What’s on Your Wishlist?

The Boston Marathon incident is somewhat instructive from an Investigative Internet Research (IIR) perspective.

News reporters are skilled at IIR — some to the exclusion of real journalistic skills if the preponderance of churnalism in the popular media is any measure. However, one instance of a reporter finding the terrorist’s Amazon Wish List is interesting. The reporter was drawing conclusions about the terrorist from the contents of the wish list.

The default Amazon Wish List setting is ‘Public’. The other settings are ‘Shared’ and ‘Private’ which seems to defeat the purpose. The default setting is the most common.

Social Search — Namechk.com

Knowem is probably the most comprehensive search site for finding user names & screen names.

NameChk is similar, but it doesn’t search as many sites (158). Be warned, this site doesn’t like Firefox, it is better to use Chrome as a browser.

The advantage of this username search is that it tells you which sites have the username available for use. Conversely, the sites that don’t have the username available might have the user that you are seeking. The sites where the name is taken are the ones that you should investigate further.

Google-Free Wednesday — Alerts

During the recent apparent demise of Google Alerts, I turned to using Talkwalker and Mention.

I found Talkwalker to be better than the broken-down Google Alerts. Mention seemed interesting, but the Web interface was not confidence inspiring and the need to download an app always makes me suspicious of what security risks that would cause.

Now that Google Alerts is working better, I am finding that it is almost keeping up with Talkwalker and finding new material in each set of results.

With the reawakeing of Google Alerts, I am not going to abandon Talkwalker and Mention — I am just going to add them to toolkit.

Social Search — Delicious.com

Delicious is a social bookmarking site. Social bookmarking is storing and sharing the sites that the user finds interesting. This site has over 6 million users. That makes it a huge catalog of what interests the registered users.

By searching for a topic, you will find users interested in that topic. Topics to search could be a protest, scandal, political movement, or a distinct event. Delicious will identify all the users who bookmarked the same site or sites about the topic. You may also find links to related meet-ups and groups interested in the topic.

Once you have matched a Delicious user-name to a real person, you can see all the sites he or she has bookmarked starting with the most recent. The bookmarks are dated. This will tell a lot about the subject’s interests, skills, plans, education, and employment. The URL of the users bookmarks will be http://delicious.com/user-name/.

All of the foregoing allows you to start building a map of the social network surrounding the topic and the associated people.

Social Search — 48ers.com

This site doesn’t offer anything special, but it works quite well. It doesn’t have a real-time refresh, which I like as it makes examination of the search results less hectic.

The results are dominated by Twitter, but it also searches Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg, and Delicious. I particularly like being able to filter the results by source as this is my starting point for searching Delicious.

Social Search — The Event Horizon

Events create a lot of social media chatter. Within this chatter or noise, the Investigator must find useful data. If the origin of the investigation is an event at a particular location, then searching for chatter that is related to the location may move the investigation forward.

GeoTagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to social media messages and other content such as images. Searching by the location usually entails entering the Latitude and Longitude of the location.

Twitter Geotags

Twitter allows users to include geotags with their tweets. Some third-party developers are using this feature. For example, Twellowhood, Twitter Local, and Twitter Nano.

Twitter Nano

Twitter Nano allows me to improve the signal-to-noise ratio when the starting point is an event or situation that I can identify with Latitude and Longitude. This will allow the Investigator to identify the people who have an interest or involvement in the event under investigation.

Of course, this doesn’t work if the user-of-interest hasn’t enabled geotagging. However, those with geotagging enabled often identify others who don’t have it enabled.

Social Search — Convoflow

Convoflow aggregates the traffic on social sites such as Blog Catalog, dailymotion Flickr, Friendfeed, Identi.ca, MetaCafe, Twitter, YouTube, and more. The results are displayed in groups — one group for each source searched.

What I find interesting with this is that doing the same search a few moments apart will yield different results. For example, a search for my surname yielded a group titled, blog search, which is presumably Google Blog Search. A second search less than one minute later returned results without the blog search group.

Social Search — The Starting Point

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Investigations often start without knowing the identity of the malefactor. Often it is an event that sparks the investigation. The aim of the investigation is to identify the malefactor.

Events create a lot of social media chatter. There will be a low signal-to-noise ratio in this chatter. The Investigator’s mission is to find the genuine signal. This requires search engines to monitor and sort through the chatter.

My efforts to increase the signal-to-noise ratio begin at Bing Social.

Bing spends a lot of money to gain access to the Twitter “firehose”. It takes money and resources to handle the data flow from Twitter. Enter a search term and you have configured a live stream of data from Twitter and Facebook. This is where I start cataloging user names for further research. Be warned though, searching user names here is hit and miss. It is easier to find the user name in the content rather than content created by the user name you are searching.

Social Search

Over the past few years, social search has become a big thing amongst Private Investigators. It feels like I have written about this for even longer. The way social sites have become part of how people communicate and interact never ceases to amaze me. It also amazes me when Investigators fail to properly identify how they find social media content.

When an Investigator finds social media content, he must report the avenue he travelled to arrive at the content. Some search engines are better than others and some index certain sites better than others. Documenting the avenue travelled to the destination is like documenting the chain of custody of a piece of physical evidence. Questions about the search process are a distraction from the nature of the content uncovered. Being unable to clearly answer questions about the search process raise questions about the Investigator’s competence.

Avoid the distractions and embarrassment — fully document the search process.

YouTube — Survival and Sanity Kit III

The Download YouTube Videos add-on for Firefox puts a download button underneath the YouTube video which allows downloading videos as MP4 and FLV formats while selecting the quality level at which to save the file.

Most extensions and add-ons that say they allow downloading YouTube videos don’t really work, this one does. If you are using e Chrome, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer, you need to install the Greasemonkey script.

YouTube — Survival and Sanity Kit II

The extension, Turn Off the Lights, darkens everything around the YouTube video.  Clicking on the small lamp icon on the toolbar makes the surroundings go dark. This is for making screen clips of the video. This extension works in most browsers and also works on other popular video sites such as Vimeo, Justin.tv, and Dailymotion.

YouTube — Survival and Sanity Kit I

Watching YouTube videos is tiresome due to the ads around each video.  The YouTube Options for Google Chrome browser extension hides the ads, annotations, disables autoplay, and hides the comments. It also allows you to change resolution, display size, optional flash pre-buffering, looping/replay, and video audio volume. It has a very useful feature to create a RSS link to the owner of the YouTube video or Twitter author.

If you have to work with a lot of YouTube material, then this thing is a necessary part of your Survival and Sanity kit. It takes some time to find and enable all the setting you need but it is worth the effort.

Explicit Words

It’s apparent that Google believes that its search algorithms are capable of determining the searcher’s intent. It is also obvious that Google filters out explicit image content, regardless of user settings. If you don’t believe me, just search for a few sex acts in the image search without any filtering and witness the effectiveness of the over-riding search restrictions.

This leaves the researcher wondering what words are on the “restricted” list. With all the euphemisms for sex acts it is easy to see that searches not related to sex acts might be restricted by Google’s all-knowing, all-seeing, algorithm.

Firefox Addon — Search Site v.3.2

Search Site 3.2 allows you to search within the current site from the search bar, or from the context menu, or by drag-and-drop into the search bar. This makes it easy to do a website-specific search, using the search engine currently selected in the search bar, if the site doesn’t have its own search box. If you use the search bar, type the search terms into the search bar and then click on the Search Site icon that appears in the search box or press Ctrl+Enter.

Searching the current site can also be done by using the right-click (context) menu. Just select the word or words you want to search and select Search Site for selection in the context menu. Unfortunately, the search results do not automatically open in a new tab, you must hold down the ctrl key as you select the Search Site for selection context menu item. Using the ctrl key will move the results to the foreground tab or if using the search bar,  hold down Ctrl  when clicking on the Search Site icon to display the results in new foreground tab.

I also recommend selecting Enclose the selected text in quotes when searching from context menu in the Options Dialog.