Archive for the 'Social Sites' Category

Social Media Gadflies & Imposters

Published on May 31, 2013 in Private Investigator and Social Sites. 0 Comments

Have you ever come across someone who has such a passion for his job that he just has to tell everybody how he does it? He leaves the location services turned on so that you know where he is doing his job. He takes pictures of places where he does his job and posts them with intact Exif data. He stands next to a famous person in photos when they don’t even know him and  implies that he is working for the famous person. This guy is on every industry forum answering questions using Google search results. He knows all the industry terminology thanks to Google.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t do the job and never has, even if he is employed in the industry, because he is only interested in self-aggrandizement. Be careful, guys like this travel in packs. If one finds your organisation or industry interesting they all will.

 

Unauthorised Facebook Fan Pages

Published on May 29, 2013 in Social Sites. 0 Comments

It looks like somebody’s web bots have mined Wikipedia and created unauthorised Facebook fan pages. I’m told that Facebook then refuses to remove these fan pages when the person or company complains. I wonder who administers these fan pages.

Social Search — Pipl.com

Published on April 24, 2013 in Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines, Search Leakage, Social Sites and Sources. 1 Comment

I bet you know about Pipl.com. I also bet you don’t know my super secret way of using it.

I have just shown you how to search usernames using three good sites. Now in this limited time offer, I will tell you about the best and most secret username search.

Pipl.com for User Names

Go to Pipl.com and put the suspected username in the field normally reserved for a person’s name, and presto, right before your very own eyes, valid results will appear that may include a lot of other vital information about your subject.

Social Search — checkusernames.com

Published on April 22, 2013 in Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines, Search Leakage and Social Sites. 0 Comments

This searches 160 social network sites for a user name. It is powered by the KnowEm search engine and has the same features of interest to the Investigator as NameChk plus a very interesting feature. It allows you to click on the faded-out links, which indicate that the username is in use, and doing so takes you to the user profile for that username.

Social Search — Namechk.com

Published on April 19, 2013 in Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Sites and Sources. 0 Comments

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.

Social Search — Delicious.com

Published on March 29, 2013 in Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Sites and Sources. 0 Comments

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

Published on March 27, 2013 in Methods, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Sites and Sources. 0 Comments

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

Published on March 25, 2013 in Search Strategies, Social Sites and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , .

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

Published on March 22, 2013 in Search Strategies and Social Sites. 0 Comments

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

Published on March 20, 2013 in Search Strategies and Social Sites. 0 Comments

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

Published on March 18, 2013 in Search Strategies and Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: .

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.

How To Hide From Twitter

Published on March 8, 2013 in Privacy, Security and Social Sites. 1 Comment Tags: .

Lately, I have been working with clients who face serious security threats. Some of these people are surprised by what can be learned about them from internet searches. Removing this information is a challenge, especially from social media sites like Twitter.

Twitter presents an interesting challenge. Once you publish a Tweet, a lot of other websites take your Tweet and reproduce it in a database. Topsy, Snap Bird, the Library of Congress, and many others get in on the act.

Of course, you can delete your Twitter account, but your Tweets will live on in a third party database.

The best solution that I have found is to remove all the Tweets from your account rather than deleting the account itself. When some third party site comes to collect your tweets to update their database, they also overwrite or delete your old Tweets and replace them with nothing matching the empty Twitter profile.

Doing this also prevents some malicious adversary from waiting thirty days then opening a new account using your deleted Twitter account name. Of course, keeping the account also allows you to start using it for some subtle disinformation.

If your Twitter account has thousands of Tweets like mine does, then you need an automated deletion service.

Twit Wipe fits the bill. Provide the service with your Twitter password and set it lose. Once Twit Wipe has done its job, change the Twitter password.

After thirty days, you should start searching for the deleted Tweets to identify any sites that still have them. If they still exist on some sites after sixty days, then consider requesting their removal.

Snap Bird

Published on December 7, 2012 in Search Engines, Social Sites and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , .

If you want to see all the Tweets from a particular Twitter account, then you are out of luck if you don’t know about Snap Bird. Twitter allows you to only search or see about a week’s worth of Tweets.

Snap Bird allows you to survey all the Tweets for a particular user if you select “Someone’s timeline” as the type of search.

This is extremely useful when trying to assess the nature of the person behind the Twitter account. Sometimes, you will find that the account is really just a bot that retweets what it finds. Sometimes, you find the account is owned by somebody with an axe to grind. Sometimes, you find the person behind the account is an activist of some type. You learn these things from reviewing all the tweets to see the general theme of the account.

The point is, you won’t know what you’re dealing with unless you can see all the Tweets coming from that account and Snap Bird allows you to do that.

 

Topsy

Published on December 5, 2012 in Search Engines, Social Sites and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , .

One of my favourite search engines for Twitter is Topsy which indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations occurring every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried.

I have been using this for almost two years as my go-to search engine for tweets about issues that currently interest my clients.

Omgili

Published on December 3, 2012 in Search Engines and Social Sites. 0 Comments

What the hell is Omgili?

After a bit of work I discovered that it stands for OhMyGogIloveIt. How cute is that?

Omgili is a vertical search engine that seems to search forums, and similar discussion sites.  It supposedly allows searching with phrases, Boolean search terms (OR, AND, NOT), wildcards, and time-frame filtering. If somebody out there knows what the wildcard symbol is, then please let me know.

The people who run this thing exhibit an interesting marketing strategy. The main search page doesn’t tell the user much about what it really searches or how to use it. I’m not sure that this cunning strategy will lead to success.

After some trial and error, I found this to work well enough to add it to my “assembly line” of search engines.