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Open Source Intelligence Gathering Practice 6

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By Hunter Mann 1 min read

Hi, throughout this repository you’ll find information on Open Source Intelligence Gathering that I hope can provide anyone with assistance to better their skills. I have the intention on publishing these on Medium, so be on the lookout for that.

Useful Links

OSINT Analysis & Practice

Tools Used

  • Google Image Search

Problem

Welcome to OSINT Exercise #006!

Task briefing: On January 19, 2023, a journalist with almost 140k followers on Twitter shared an image of a destroyed vehicle amidst a large cloud of smoke and fire. The tweet said: “BREAKING: TTP carried out a suicide attack on a police post in Khyber city of Pakistan that killed three Pakistani police officers.“

The photo is not of the event described by the journalist. a) Verify the statement above.

Click here to open the photo on a new tab.

Exercise level: For beginners: Easy For experts: Easy Tweet

Solution + Thought Process

  1. In the problem description it states that the photo is not from the event described. Taking that little tidbit of information, our first thought is to scan Google to see if this image has been used elsewhere…

Intiatial Google Image Search

  1. There’s an option to select exact matches for our image in question. Let’s click it.

See exact image results

  1. Without too much trouble, we are given quite a few different articles that seem to match up with our original photo in the tweet. Some of these even date back to earlier dates than when the tweet was posted. This should be a big hint that the tweet could be spreading misleading information.

  2. Opening a few different article posts gives us more information on how this photo could possibly be from a few different soruces. This more than confirms that the tweet is not correct in using the photo to depict the descibed event.

Takeaways

  • Don’t trust tweets, or any media, online without validating that you are getting the correct information. It is very easy to mislead, especially in today’s time where we’re all connected through social media.

  • Google image search is a viable way to search information on photos posted online.

tutorial, OSINT
cyber security OSINT Google Image Search
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.

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