OSINT: A way of life and a window into mine..........

In my last article we took a look at some great starting points for your first steps into the world of OSINT and the response and Feedback I received was absolutely incredible!

Firstly let me thank everyone who took the time to give it a read or share as it genuinely means a lot to me, If you haven't had the chance to check it out then simply click the link below:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/first-steps-world-osint-justin-casey

This article is going to be a little bit different.

As we learned in the last article, there are so many amazing people in the OSINT community who share techniques and methods which can be used during the course of an investigation so we wont cover methods today, instead I would like to share with you some of the realities of conducting OSINT Investigations that many new comers often overlook.

In my experience the initial concept of being an OSINT Analyst to new students seems somewhat 'sexy' they often imagine working in a big SOC (Security Operations Center) where people are frantically working on piecing together the bigger picture in order to save the world.

Although this may be 'somewhat' an accurate depiction for Military Intelligence analysts as part of a high profile operation, in reality for the average OSINT analyst and more specifically as a freelance analyst this most certainly is not the case, instead it is often more common to be spending countless hours on a squeaky office chair in front of 1 or 2 monitors and drinking way too much coffee.

However, even though it may not be as sexy as your favorite novel or what you've seen on TV, an OSINT Investigation can still be just as rewarding and satisfying when you find that needle in the haystack.....but first you need to learn patience!

They say patience is a virtue and that has never been more true than in the world of OSINT. Although depending on the defined scope and target some cases may provide almost instant gratification by finding exactly what you need to pivot from with a few clicks but the majority of the time it requires the patience to methodically assess 50+ links involving different mediums from social profiles, images, videos, articles, records, etc.

I strongly believe that true OSINT is a mindset, not to bounce back to the OSINTCURIOUS team again but they're slogan 'Stay OSINT Curious' really hits the nail on the head because as an instructor of OSINT I can teach my students how to use hundreds of different helpful tools that are available but without emphasizing on that truly curious mindset then their careers will be short and unfruitful as no matter how great a tool or program may be it is very common for tools to just stop working one day out of the blue for many reasons.

One of my favorite cases I have worked on for a client demonstrates how important curiosity is in terms of OSINT as a mindset.

I was tasked with building a dossier on a high profile target to report on his lifestyle outside of work and after an hour of setting up a sanitized lab and preparing digital assets (sock puppets, accounts, email addresses, etc.) I was ready to begin. It didn't take long into the investigation to notice that the target had gone to extreme length to scrub his digital footprint. After a few hours of using every tool in my arsenal and exhausting all the typical methods I could not find anything apart from a professional bio on a company website and 2 articles where he was interviewed about his work.

I was frustrated, ready to give up and call the client when I decided to scrap everything I had and go back to the start. Reading through the articles I noticed that the target had mentioned what university he got his degree at and the year he graduated. Using this as a pivot point I done all the typical google dorks using the targets name and university as key phases but found very little to work with. I then went to the universities website and found that they had a digital archive of the student union magazine. After going through nearly every magazine I could find I finally came across a picture of the target sitting with a female on the campus green of a sunny day, no article or further information simply nothing more than a nice picture. Bare in mind that this picture had been taken around 20 years prior the time of the investigation. With nothing else to go on and just out of sheer curiosity I decided to take a look into who the female was and after about 30 mins the whole case unraveled!

Get this......it turns out that the pair where childhood sweethearts and ended up getting married!! I was seriously surprised when I seen the targets name listed on the property she had purchased just one year prior to the investigation, This was it the needle in the haystack, the weak-link as once I began checking out her social media I found everything I needed. There was pictures of them both on holidays, what car he drove, where they lived, everything!

There are two lessons to take away from that case:

1. Stay Curious! you can have all the fancy tools in the world but sometimes it just takes a curious mindset to find exactly what you need.
2. No matter how strong your opsec seems your friends and family might not have the same mindset, threat landscapes or value of privacy that you do so keep that in mind.

Technically that is the article finished but while writing this I went off on a tangent and the article start forming into something else totally different where I share a personal window into a chapter in my life and how I done my first OSINT investigation without even knowing it so if your interest then keep reading............

I would like to share some personal aspects of my life and how I began my first ever encounter with the world of OSINT without even knowing it at the time. As an infant I was placed into the care of the state at just two months old and grew up in a Foster care placement until I hit the age of 16 when I was placed into a 'Residential unit'. With 24 hour staff on site it was far from the typical home/family structure. Shortly before my 18th birthday I was kicked out of the residential unit and being an angry, confused teenager with no form of stability I found myself homeless and sleeping on the streets of Dublin city center. Growing up I was never really told the full non-sugarcoated story as to why I was placed into care of the state and to be totally honest I never really questioned it, until I found myself homeless waking up at 7am on the cold pavement to the sound of footsteps as people made their morning commute to work. Its situations like that when you really begin to question life, "how did I get here & where do I go next?" I needed answers!

At the time there where not many places in Dublin city that you could spend a couple of hours indoors without being 'moved on', so as the rain began to batter the striped canopy of a closed fruit stall I sat under at the iconic Moore St outdoor market. I had to find somewhere to raise the body heat, dry off and recuperate for a few hours before facing another long night beneath the sheltered arches of Dublin's most famous historical building, The GPO.

I took a walk into the Ilac shopping center and sat on the steps of the only stairway I could see, after a couple of minutes I was approached by security who said I couldn't sit there. I wrongly assumed he was just going to move me along like most of the other places do but I think he knew I wasn't actually waiting on anything but just trying to stay in out of the rain so instead I was relieved when he said "come on there's seats upstairs just grab a book and chill out". At this stage I had no clue what was upstairs so being a little hesitant it was either go check it out or head back out into the rain......thankfully as I got to the top of the stairs I realized it was a public library.

This became my daily refuge rain or not I would hit the library and spend hours reading books, magazines and playing the keyboard piano they had, after a couple of weeks I got a supporting letter from one of the staff at crosscare homeless charity so that I could apply for a library card without having an actual fixed abode. What might seem like a small thing to most, getting my own library card was actually the catalyst that eventually sent me down the OSINT rabbit hole as it meant now that I was an actual member of the library I could use the computers and search the internet, now I had all the ingredients to get some of the answers I needed......at least that's what I thought at the time!

From the second I sat down at the computer cubical I had one clear objective.....Find out 'exactly what happened that led to me being placed in care?' At the time I obviously had no idea whatsoever about OSINT, I had never even so much as heard the term before so I started as most do by typing something into 'GOOGLE' and hitting enter!

Unfortunately after days of browsing I was no better off than when I first began, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't find anything about me or my parents, no news articles, no access to records, NOTHING! I knew I needed some sort of direction, I got speaking to one of the ladies who worked in the library who said I should check out the newspaper archives in the National library of Ireland on Kildare St. this was the first plausible lead source I had and I was confident that it was the direction I needed both figuratively and literally as the lady was kind enough to print off the directions for me without charging me the 10c fee for black and white prints. I think she knew how important this was to me and I got the impression that if she could, she would have gone to view the archives with me just to settle her own curiosity at that stage. As it was near closing time I would have to wait anxiously till the next morning before I could get that one step closer....

That night was probably one of the first nights in a strange way that I actually looked forward to putting the head down on the concrete to get asleep, so I started my nightly routine as I walked through the lane-way adjoining Moore St. and Henry St. where the green industrial sized recycling bin belonging to a soap shop on Henry St was kept. It was one of these shops that people go into if only just to smell the different scents of each hand crafted luxury soap or candle. My favorite was always the fresh cotton, I don't quiet know exactly why but for some reason it reminded me of better times. As they just sold soaps and candles housed in glass jars their recycle bin in the lane way was filled with rolls of bubble wrap and cardboard. You don't need to be homeless to understand that these are the perfect ingredients for an 'urban bed'...

I have always been quite resilient and would welcome any opportunity to make an uncomfortable situation even slightly more bearable. I gathered enough materials and made my way to the GPO on O'Connell St. This was my usual 'go-to' place to put the head down but it was a tactical decision and by no means random!

The GPO has huge Colosseum like columns that hold up a solid concrete canopy which sheltered me from the rain and has individual alcoves at every window that offered an extra foot or two in away from the footfall traffic that would pass. I would always try to get there early and 'reserve' my favorite window before someone else did, It was the middle window which had a statue of CU CHULAIN and a metal grate below it that would sometimes pump out heat from the old heating system in the building. As I lay on a bed of cardboard wrapped in a blanket of bubble wrap with my back against the metal grate I settled down for the night under a cast bronze statue titled the death of CU CHULAIN in honor of the Men and Women who died during the Easter Rising of 1916.

IMAGE CREDIT OF 'ONE IRELAND' HOMELESS CHARITY THAT SUPPORTS VETERANS - https://www.facebook.com/ONEIreland

The next morning like all the ones before I was awoke by a member of the Gardai who had just taken up his post after the morning shift change, each morning they would start with the same joke by asking me where my stamp is? when I first asked what they meant they would laugh and say I was outside the biggest post office in the country wrapped in bubble wrap with a flattened cardboard box and that I forgot the postage stamp! Some mornings they would mix it up and ask me where I was being posted to that day but haven got very little sleep and with the cold creeping up from the pavement through the layers of cardboard and into my core throughout the night I never really found their jokes as funny as they did. I always thought they where just being assholes by waking me up each morning, but they eventually explained that they had to ensure I was actually alive when they got there to start their beat, which was fair enough and understandable I guess.

With the national Library not opening for another few hours I packed up my urban bed brought it to the nearest recycle bin and then would hit the local casino where I could grab a free cup of tea to warm the body and start the day. It may not be your typical routine but in that situation any form of daily routine or structure provides a small but strange sense of normality.

Following the directions the librarian had printed for me I arrived outside the National Library building almost hesitant to go in. What was once excitement to get answers suddenly turned into nerves as I began to question if I really wanted to know the full truth. I frantically cycled through all the 'What If' scenarios in my mind before walking inside. I couldn't help feeling totally out of place as I walked in and the whole room opened up into a huge dome ceiling structure. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, with a kind of echo chamber effect that you could have heard a pin drop as I stood still and gazed up and around the room. Filled with academics, researchers, staff and then Me! There I was in the same clothes I slept in looking exactly how I felt....'Like I didn't belong there'.

I approached the desk where a man asked if he could help me, I asked where I could find all the old archived newspapers to which he explained they have a database and If I just write down what newspapers I need to see he will get them for me......I didn't know what to do because I never thought this far through, I just assumed I would stroll in and find a shelf with loads of old newspapers but that was far from the truth. I took a piece of paper and wrote down the date range from the time I was born up until the time I was placed in care and told him I wanted every Irish newspaper within that date range! He looked baffled as he tried to explain how many newspapers that actually involved so we agreed to take it on a week by week basis.

As I waited for him to gather the newspapers I took a lap around the library reading room, it was amazing, as if it was frozen in time I could almost picture old IRA men using it as a location to execute tradecraft or how many famous writers once sat in that very room.

After a couple of minutes the man arrived back with a small shoe sized box, it was certainly not what I was expecting, there was no way in hell a weeks worth of newspapers could have fit in this box. I opened the box and instantly felt like it was some sort of joke, I had no idea what I was looking at however Fast forward a couple of minutes after a brief lesson in microfilms and how to use the equipment I was ready to begin. Looking back on it now really makes me grateful and appreciate how easily we can access information as investigators in today's world.

I eventually got the hang of the equipment and began sieving through the countless newspapers, page after page, line after line.....I soon realized that it was going to take a lot longer than I thought but in all honesty its not like I had better things to be doing, It kept me off the streets and out of the rain for a few hours each day and I gradually began to like the eery silence in the reading room with nothing but the sound of footsteps, pages turning and the odd cough. It didn't take long for the staff there to realize I was on a mission to find something that was important to me as after a few days they would welcome me by name and already have the next batch of micro films ready and waiting for me each morning.

After about a week of going through every paper, reading all sorts of interesting articles I began to feel I new more about that time period then the current events at the time, nevertheless I still had not found what I was searching for, the week came to an end and the library closed up until Monday morning. I was pissed off and had nearly two days to wait before I could get back on the case, during this time doubt began to cloud my mind.

Monday morning finally arrived and the walk to the national library which was once one I looked forward to now felt more like I was 'walking the mile', I was tired and frustrated and felt like I would never get the answers I wanted. After a few more hours of sieving through the newspaper micro films slide by slide just before the library closed up for lunch there it was, a headline that stopped me in my tracks and as a split second felt like minutes I read it slowly in my head "Community shocked as.........."

I hope you have enjoyed reading this short glimpse of a chapter in my life, thankfully I have been fortunate enough to totally turn my life around but I really hope that you appreciate it is not easy nor does it come natural to put myself 'out there' and share something that is personal to me however I do hope to continue it in the future but for now I have a few more chapters to live :)

If you have enjoyed this read then please do give it a share and drop me a comment or reach out to me as I love to hear feedback and network with new people.

Until next time........