Global Bob Show
Global Bob who is a cyber security expert and political science hobbyist brings you a show that fuses these topics together to explain in simple terms the interaction between the two. He uses his years of experience in both the government, commercial and private sector to give a unique perspective on these topics.
Global Bob Show
Episode 30 - From Public Posts to Private Profiles: The Art of Open Source Intelligence
Your digital footprint reveals far more about you than you might realize. From vacation photos that pinpoint your exact hotel to scattered social media posts that unveil your daily routines, the breadcrumbs we leave across the internet create a comprehensive map of our lives for anyone who knows how to read them.
This week, we dive into the fascinating world of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) – the practice of gathering and analyzing publicly available information to create insights that weren't obvious from any single source. Unlike classified intelligence methods that require special access or equipment, OSINT relies entirely on data that's freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection and the right analytical approach.
The power of OSINT becomes startlingly clear when our co-host recounts how she tracked down her twin sister's exact location in an Asian country using nothing but a Facebook photo and ChatGPT. Despite her sister turning off location services and not responding to messages, one seemingly innocuous photo provided enough clues to identify the specific hotel where she was staying – a demonstration of how our casual posts can unintentionally compromise our privacy.
We also explore how citizen journalists from Bellingcat used laptop computers and public data to investigate the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, piecing together evidence that identified the missile launcher responsible before official investigations could reach conclusions. Their work exemplifies how OSINT techniques have democratized intelligence gathering, empowering ordinary people to uncover truths previously accessible only to government agencies.
Whether you're concerned about your own digital privacy or curious about the investigative methods reshaping journalism, law enforcement, and everyday detective work, this episode offers essential insights into how your online presence speaks volumes when you're not listening. Join us to learn how the digital age has transformed information gathering and what it means for all of us navigating this interconnected world.
All right, all right, here we go. It is that time of the week for the Global Bob Show. The Global Bob Show. We are the crossroad of technology and politics. We're back again this week and broadcasting from the Richard Lowell Cook Broadcast Facility. Now, in case some of y'all don't know or don't remember, richard Cook was my grandfather and he was a pioneer in radio, so I think that's where I got the gene from. So here in studio with me is wait for it an official drum roll. Okay, she did her own drum roll. Hello, shelly, hello, yay. So y'all remember, when we reloaded the podcast, we said that she would have to be on five podcasts, which would be a month plus one week, and this is episode number 30. So she has made it five consecutive shows and so she is an official co-host.
Speaker 1:Yay.
Speaker 2:Remember, it's still my show and you're not going to take it over, but we kind of I'm still planning it. Yeah, I mean it's kind of like military rank right.
Speaker 1:I mean.
Speaker 2:You know, it's just a natural progression, right. You come in and then now you're up to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm just a cadet right now, but I'm working my way up.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, you know what? That's right, you're an official cadet. Yeah Well, we are here in Central Florida and had a little thunderstorm move in, and we also had this wicked ground loop that we had to get settled before we could start broadcasting. So for y'all that don't know, a ground loop is when you have multiple paths to ground with audio devices and mainly on microphones. So we do have a dual microphone set up here, and so we had to figure out where that dual path came from, and we figured it out. So here we go. The other thing is is that we did get a little bit of feedback and her angelic voice. We were told hello, shelly's angelic voice was just a little too low, and so now she is using the Heil P40 mic and we're hoping that that in-fired microphone will help bring her voice out some. So, needless to say, we are rocking and rolling. So what do we get for them this week, shelly?
Speaker 1:open source intelligence open source intelligence.
Speaker 2:They call that ozent ozent ozent ocent ocent it almost sounds like a derogatory term right when you like drop, uh, drop your phone and you're like ocent, but but it's really O-O-O with some kind of Gosh dang it. Yeah, some kind of OSINT. Yeah, osint, maybe that's Russian OSINT.
Speaker 1:O-S-I-N-T. For those who don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, as we've been watching the news this week, there seems to be a lot of stuff in politics where the Russians have some information on Hillary Clinton and they were going to release it. Hillary Clinton became president, but she didn't become president. And so now, like I always say, no matter what side of the aisle you're on, you know we talk about technology and politics. And so now the director, tulsi Gabbard, has declassified some of the intelligence, and this is all leading to what we're going to talk about today. There's different intelligence. Now, it's no secret, you can Google, search me and find out that I worked for one of the government agencies, and so you know we dealt in intelligence. We would gather the intelligence and through different means, and with that we had SIGINT, and I think on some of the podcasts we've talked a little bit about SIGINT.
Speaker 1:But signal intelligence, signal Intelligence.
Speaker 2:Signal Intelligence. That's exactly what it stands for. And then the CIA. They're mostly into what they call human.
Speaker 1:Human Intelligence. Human Intelligence.
Speaker 2:So these are intelligent sources, either through signals or through human sources, but today we want to talk about OSINT, which is open source intelligence. Now, OSINT there's a line between the two. Okay, OSINT is taking things that people post out on the Internet or companies post out on the Internet, and whereas signal intelligence is usually gathered through clandestine means, which means if you are running a SIGINT collection at your house, on your neighbor's house or at your office, on one of your co -workers hello Shelly, welcome to jail. You cannot do that right.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Because that is illegal. Right and as we know, schumann, is the passing of secrets that humans know is the passing of secrets that humans know, so that's illegal also. So the Russians claim to have some intelligence that they were going to release on Hillary Clinton, and they probably got it through human sources, but there's other ways that maybe they could have got to that information, using OSINT or open source intelligence. So, shelly, why don't you tell us a little bit about OSINT?
Speaker 1:So open source intelligence is gathering information from public data so that could be from the web or from Facebook or Twitter and using it to gather intelligence on someone.
Speaker 2:So, exactly right, with OSINT, there's kind of four pillars of it, there's four processes of it, and this is true really for any of the intelligence gathering. There's collection right. You're going to collect this data from a bunch of data sources and then you're going to process this data and then, after processing the data, you're going to analyze the data and then you're going to disseminate the data and essentially what you're doing with OSINT data sources is like each one by themselves really isn't that big of a deal, or isn't earth shattering right.
Speaker 2:But if you combine multiple OSINT sources, like some data from Facebook, some data from Twitter, it's like putting a puzzle together.
Speaker 1:Exactly, it's like putting Of information, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like putting a puzzle together with the information to produce a story or some kind of intel that would not be known without putting these together. We're going to dive into this a little deeper, but before we do that, I went out to some of your social media sites Insta, that's what the kids say, by the way. Now it's Insta, I guess it's too much to say Instagram.
Speaker 1:Insta.
Speaker 2:Your Facebook. I, I think, has it your twitter but you, you are the self indoctrinated, educated oscent queen. I mean, I think it actually says that I'm I'm oscent queen oh, I know that's bad.
Speaker 1:I shouldn't say that.
Speaker 2:So what she's saying is, ladies and gentlemen, is that she's already profiled all of y'all and put some good intelligence together, and she'll be disseminating those here very soon, unless you send her some Bitcoin or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Hold on, let me get my wallet ready. Yeah, so why don't you give us a real world example of how you used OSINT, in a playful kind of way, with a particular family member that may or may not look exactly like you? What y'all don't know is Hello Shelly. There's a Hello Shelly also, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a Hello Shey also, I guess. Yeah, there's a hello.
Speaker 2:Shelly too hello shelly too.
Speaker 1:It's like yin and yang and thing one thing too I.
Speaker 2:I like the yin yang twins. Isn't that like a rap?
Speaker 1:group that is right.
Speaker 2:So shelly is going to tell us all in the world how she used oset to run a little operation against her twin sister.
Speaker 1:Oh gosh, she's going to kill me for this. By the way, that's okay, we got enough. We got enough. My family already knows.
Speaker 2:Okay, it's all right, we have enough Oset dirt on her. We'll just put it out there on X.
Speaker 1:So my sister and her fiancé.
Speaker 2:Fiancé Is that.
Speaker 1:French Fiancé Fiancé. Is that French Fiancé Fiancé? Yes, and fiancé is the same, both male and female. But it's spelled differently, but it's said the same in French.
Speaker 2:Anyways, parlez-vous français.
Speaker 1:Yeah, parlez-vous français.
Speaker 2:Okay, tell us the story.
Speaker 1:So my sister and her fiancé went and traveled over to a like Asian country, and so in the middle of her travels she had turned off her location on her phone.
Speaker 2:Oh, is this the story that coincided with a possible engagement or something like that? Is that why they traveled there?
Speaker 1:I think yes, so I think that was supposed to happen, but I'm not sure why that didn't happen. Oh my, gosh.
Speaker 2:Okay, we're off track here, but that's a good one. We'll talk after we get done with the podcast.
Speaker 1:So she turns off her location she's in an Asian country. Yeah, she's in an Asian country and how I kind of knew that she had turned off her location. It says that last known was four hours ago. So I'm like okay, but I'm on Facebook and I see a post that she put on there and it was just a photo of some ornate structural like I'm trying to remember how, like, how to describe it.
Speaker 2:It's like those wooden structures they have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, kind of like when you walk in the Chinese restaurant and it has like statues on it, yeah, okay, and vases and stuff. So anyway, I'm like okay. I'm like okay. So she wasn't. I tried texting and calling her and she wasn't texting me back and wasn't calling me back. So I thought, okay, well, I'm going to figure out where she's at. So remember, where in the world is Carmen?
Speaker 2:San Diego, oh, yeah, I used to watch that all the time, okay.
Speaker 1:So this is where in the world is Shelly's twin Yep? So I'm like, okay, so I'm going to figure out where she's at. I know she's in an Asian country, so I took her photo and put it into. First I decided to put it into an EXIF tool data tool.
Speaker 2:What is EXIF data tool? Because that's an OSINT tool, right.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So her location's off. She posts something on Facebook.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And you're like, hey, let me see what all I can figure out from this tool Right.
Speaker 1:So this tool gives you, like date and time, the device, the photo was taken on, the location.
Speaker 2:All of this from a photo, right, right. So my mom loves taking photos. And so she does all this, so you can basically process those photos and find things.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So, fun fact, I learned how to do this when I took photography class. We use exit tools Anyway, so I'm like, okay, so I'm not getting any information. It's showing the date of the photo when it was posted on Facebook. So, apparently, come to find out, facebook strips all the data off the photo.
Speaker 2:Oh, to help with the privacy part.
Speaker 1:Yes, so I thought okay, so this is. I need to dig further. So I used one wonderful tool that a lot of people know about. It is actually ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, yeah, I mean we've been teaching a couple of classes on ChatGPT and yeah. So tell us, what you did.
Speaker 1:So I put the photo into chat GBT and I kind of gave it a story right. So I set up my prompt saying I took this photo overseas. Can you give me a list of hotels in Asian country that has this identical or same ornate structure?
Speaker 2:Wow, that's very interesting. That's the first time I've ever heard seriously and I know a lot of hacker type people but I've never heard of taking that picture and putting it, because usually you know, I mean I run XF tools also and if it, you know, a lot of times you know it does get stripped down unless someone sends it directly to you. So, so you take the picture of Hello Shelly too.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 1:And you upload it and you tell chat, gpt where is this, or what hotels and she mentioned not malaysia, but I don't remember the country at the top of my head, but I did put in a specific country in that vicinity to narrow down my search, and so it gave me top 10 list of hotels, because I did find out from her that they were staying at a hotel somewhere overseas, and so I kind of put the pieces together. Okay, she's over there, they're staying at a hotel. This photo to me looks like it's in a hotel, cause you can just kind of tell. Maybe I could post the photo on my website just for to give you know an example. So, anyways, I went through each list or each item on that list of hotels, and I got to the. I got to the first one, and this is funny. I'll explain two things. I did so with the first link I went to their website.
Speaker 1:Some, some of the websites are duds, like they don't have photos or they don't show anything. So I went through the first one. Not many photos. I'm looking at the ceiling, the wall, the windows, anyways. So the first one was a dud. The second one was a dud. The third one looked very similar. I was like, ah, I think I know where this is. So I went to YouTube. Here's another source for you guys. I went to YouTube and looked up a tour video of the lobby and the guy pans around and boom, there it is. That's the ornate structural stand thing in this photo.
Speaker 2:That is very scary to know that, just off of a photo that was uploaded to Facebook and knowing that Facebook has measures in place to keep that, you know, to keep that ex of data out of there, you were able to use AI and you knew she was in an Asian country.
Speaker 1:I mean just those two together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you were able to track her down. Yes, that's absolutely scary and amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I just used open, open AI but chat, gpt and youtube and the, the website to that hotel to put all the pieces together.
Speaker 2:wow, I think that the wife of the ceo at the coldplay concert. She didn't even have to use any oscent because I mean, I was just plastered right there.
Speaker 2:But yes, but you know the same thing. Just a simple picture can can do that. So the one thing that we want to tell everybody is is that a lot of times, folks think that, well, I don't give them my credit card number, I don't give my social security number, but all of this information that we post out there can be used to create a dossier. Right, and Speaking of that, while we were just here in the middle of this podcast, I popped up one of my favorite OSINT tools, and I'm going to leave this tool unnamed just because I don't want to enable people to use this Because a lot of times, I mean.
Speaker 1:There's a fine line between and you can't cross like. If you're using it for fun, like as in like a family member or something, and they know who you are right, Then that makes kind of a difference. But if you're trying to stalk someone or use it against someone for very bad means, that is not the right way to go about it and that can get you in trouble.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. Everyone knows my older brother, which I will leave his name anonymous, but I'm sure y'all can track down who he is. I think this guy is like the king of social media. I think he's on social media platforms that we don't even know about yet. And I just put in a piece of open source intelligence that I know of him, which is his email address, and from that I got 15 hits on him.
Speaker 2:Right now I can tell you a lot of the platforms he's on, which is Microsoft, and the last time this tool got a hit on him was 7-23, which was yesterday, so I know he's using Microsoft. I can see that some of his credentials have been breached on some of these websites. And because of that now we know what other social media sites he's on. We also grab all of his screen names, because some of them he uses.
Speaker 1:I don't want to give it out, but we know one of his favorite swimwearers and that's in his name. But yeah, what else do I get?
Speaker 2:Just a lot of information on here. Linkedin, there's a. I'm just looking through all of this stuff. I guess at one time he had AT&T.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Because there was a breach that happened and his email address has popped up in there. Now, what we can do now is start putting this information together and maybe we want to try to send him spear phishing emails, or maybe we want to try to get into those accounts. Let's say we want to get into his Facebook account. Well, from this OSINT tool that I'm using, I can see the username and some of the passwords that he's used in the past, and these usernames and passwords are on. I would say they're not tier one sites like Facebook, and that I mean some of these ones I've never even heard of. But I guarantee you dollars to donuts because we all do it besides us in the security world. No, even us in the security world do this.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:We reuse usernames and passwords.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And now you can see this is where you start crossing the line from OSINT into actually compromising an account, right, and this is where you were talking about. You know, there's a fine line and there is a very fine line. And anybody that uses this could well. Actually they would be breaking the law. But what's even really interesting is that now, from my open source intelligence, he has a Yelp account. Wow, and now I can look at his Yelp account and see what reviews and stuff, what restaurants?
Speaker 2:maybe he put not even that part, but like restaurants and stuff. You know if you can get into this thing and you know what's scary?
Speaker 1:You can learn someone's pattern of life that way as well, if they're using it like all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, and so what we're trying to explain to folks is one is this whole thing with OSINT right Lots of data sources from all these different sources that get fused together to create something that he may not want the public to know. Now, moving right along with this, when you see things that get leaked by journalists because journalists use OSINT, your employer uses OSINT. Whenever I worked for another security company, they had a whole product that its only job was to scrape and search the internet for this, and so there's ramifications that you can have by putting your information out there. So journalist, your employer Also too. We've seen it on the news here lately the guy that was throwing rocks but he had his face covered. At the ICE vehicles they used a bunch of OSINT and different intelligence, but mainly going out to his socials and stuff, and this person was hiding in Mexico and they were able to track him down and go get him out of Mexico. Here locally, the Polk County Sheriff's Department they had a person that was wanted for something I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they were actually taunting online the Polk Sheriff posting stuff saying hey, come find me, and stuff. And these folks that are in this OSINT world, whether it's the HR person for a company you're applying for or law enforcement, they are very good. The tools that we've talked about and some of the examples that we've given here today, I mean this is like just scraping the kind of like the surface.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the surface Theirs is more into a deeper dive of specific things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so one of those professional I guess. I don't know if they call themselves professional, because it's a bunch of citizens that do it, but it's a billing cat or be Belling cat. Belling cat. Okay, well, everyone knows that I'm a math guy ones and zeros and I would probably spell cat with a K. But can you tell our audience how to get to that website? Like the spelling?
Speaker 1:Yes, it's a B-E-L-L-I-N-G cat C-A-T, and that's all together.
Speaker 2:Bellingcat. Okay, so what they are is a collection of citizens and journalists, and they have on their site, bellingcatcom, some of the stuff that they have discovered through open source intelligence, and one of the ones is MH17. And for those that don't remember, mh17 was the flight that took off July, the 17th 2014. And it was shot down over Ukraine and it killed 250, 300 people, something like that. And you know there was a lot of misinformation that was out on the news and most of it was like the intelligence agencies supposedly were struggling to piece together exactly what happened to the jet. Now we understand it's flying over a conflict zone or potential conflict zone, and it just got shot down, but nothing was really definitive. So why they struggled?
Speaker 2:There was a small group of citizen journalists and they had their laptops and internet access and they were able to basically crack the case, and they did it by using Google Earth and social media. Part of the reason they were trying to put all this together was to say, did it actually get shot down or not? And you know, traditional investigations like this, they could take years, if not longer, you know, just to come out with something, even though you know, we know things are plainly obvious. So there was a British blogger by the name of Elliot Higgins and he started putting together some of the social media different things and they were able to look at YouTube and Twitter at the time before Uncle Elon bought it and various social Russian social networks. You know they have their own flavors of things over in Russia and they were able to find a video that showed a buck missile launcher driving through the town and I'm probably going to mess up this name like Shazin, something like that.
Speaker 2:But anyways a town but wasn't really there. So what they did was is that they used just one photograph that one of the folks on the team found and they were able to confirm the missile launcher did go through multiple towns and I believe that one was one of them. So they took and knew, because everybody has these phones in your pocket.
Speaker 2:And anyone that's ever worked around military installations. That is like a no-no Whether you got a clearance or not, they tell you do not take pictures of anything unless it's authorized and stuff. But some of these Russians got a little sloppy. They're taking pictures of this missile launcher that was rolling through town and then they started looking at various timestamps and said that hey, this missile launcher was in the right spot to do this. They also saw that this buck you said the buck's a missile launcher right B-U-K missile.
Speaker 2:Right, they had some really identified markings on there and they were able to identify the truck that pulled the missile launcher. So that was pretty good. But the main breakthrough came when they found some satellite imagery showing fresh burn marks. And so it just so happens that the time the missile launched and it went and did its bit, well, maybe a day or so or hour, don't know, but a satellite came overhead and there were some open source pictures that came of that and they could zoom in because they knew about where the missile launcher could be and they found you know, not to be cliche, but the smoking gun. They found these burn marks around that and so they started chaining all this together. They had a Russian buck launcher. It was in Ukrainian territory. There's a missing missile, so one had to be launched and they put it all together. And what's really interesting is is that probably the intelligence agencies already knew all of this. I mean, there's things like DeafSmack and other organizations that monitor missile launches and things, but you know, these folks, using just the internet and their laptops, were able to just show how powerful this is. So that is a very good example of how you can use open source intelligence to actually derive military intelligence.
Speaker 2:All right, we are at the bottom of the half hour and we appreciate everybody riding along with us and, as always, if you have any comments or questions, please send them in, either through the website. If you know myself or HelloShelly personally, then you can always ping us and, of course, always give us feedback. If you like the show, share the show. If you didn't like the show, share the show. So that's what we need. We need folks to share the show.
Speaker 2:Uh, looking at some of the stats, it's kind of neat seeing where everybody's listening in from. Uh, one of our highest countries outside of the united states I think this is the second highest country that streams us is German. That's awesome. That's really cool. Yeah, so I don't know a lot of German, even though I am German descent. So there's a little piece of OSINT. I've leaked to you in my podcast all kinds of stuff so you can paint a picture of me. But, yeah, I'm going to have to learn to speak a little german so I can say hello in germany to, uh, some of our listeners. All right, well, we'll see you all here next week. Be safe, thank you.