Basic techniques for finding email addresses, tracking someone’s online activity, finding data in images, and more.
In this article, I’ll cover certain basic investigative techniques such as discovering a person’s online aliases, digging deeper into leads (such as profile images), leveraging Google to uncover files, and setting up a system to get real time notifications about your target’s online activity.
1) Dictionary mining
This method is used by spam bots to guess email addresses, but it can be a valuable technique for online investigation as well.
Subjects will often use the same nicknames for their emails as they do for forums and blogs. So if the person of interest is sweetsparkles02, chances are the person’s email is sweetsparkels02@hotmail.com. An investigator can try sending a test message to that email and wait for a bounce back. If ‘delivery-failure bounce back message’ message is not sent back it means that sweetsparkels02@hotmail.com is a real email address. Some hackers try to gain access to those emails by selecting “forgot password” link and guessing the secret question.
Discovering what aliases a person uses can be done by searching for the person’s name. For example, Twitter will show the username associated with the person’s real name. Other tools for checking where the username appears are http://socialmention.com/ and http://checkusernames.com/
2) Reverse Image Tracking through Exif Data/Tineye
Armed with a name, it’s possible to find websites a person visits. Once you figure that out, you can perform a reverse lookup on the images to A) Uncover additional sites visited by the target B) Discover a person’s location.
A) Profile picture can be used to discover other sites visited by the target by checking which other sites have the same profile image. Web-sites like tineye.com, show all other sites with the same image. This can be particularly revealing for catching cheating spouses who post the same profile picture across multiple dating sites.
B) Smartphones often Geotag pictures with GPS coordinates, which means it’s possible to uncover the location of where a picture was taken by looking inside its EXIF data. Many sites including Facebook delete this information, but sites like Twitter or Photobucket preserve it.
3) Picture fishing
Another way to get pictures of a person is by asking. Fishing out pictures can be done by means of a fictitious dating profile. To get the most recent picture one needs to ask the subject to hold a spoon in order to prove that their profile picture is a recent one. The picture sent by the target may reveal GPS coordinates in the EXIF data.
4) File search
File search can be very effective. There is a special Google search operator which shows files stored on uncovered servers. Using this method it’s possible to discover files belonging to a person, like a CV.
The search is done by typing the following command in Google.com: intitle:”index of” “parent directory” john doe (John Doe should be replaced with subject’s name or alias).
The above search format is known as “Advanced Google Search Operator”.
5) Google Alerts
Setting up a Google alerts on the subject’s name and/or alias (google.com/alerts) is done to get up to date notifications from Google when the name comes up somewhere online.
This is like employing Google to stay on guard for all new mentions of the person’s name/alias. As soon as Google discovers the name online it sends a notification.
6) Search within a site
Often a person will hang out on certain websites. Unfortunately many sites (especially blogs) do not have a built-in “user search” function that shows all pages where the subject has interacted (left a comment, created a profile etc.).
In that case it’s possible to do the following search in Google site:doman.com John Doe, while replacing the domain.com and John Doe with name of the site and subject’s name/nickname. This will show all comments made by the subject on a given site, example of a query would be site: pursuitmag.com “chris says:”
This can be useful for building target’s psychological profile. Often people mention personal details in comments, such as the city they’re in and sites they visit. This a good source of additional leads and a chance to apply other steps described above.
About the author:
Robert Sinclair is an online investigation enthusiast and chief-editor of http://whycall.me