Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been a goldmine of information for intelligence researchers, marketers and those who simply want to gain valuable insights into people’s interests or affiliations. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the practice of collecting and analysing publicly available data from these platforms, which has led to the development of numerous tools that help automate this process. In this article, we will discuss some of these tools that can enhance social media intelligence.
Namechk is a straightforward tool that is used to search for people’s online personas. By entering a username, the tool searches various online platforms to find user profiles that match the information provided. Namechk is useful for researchers, journalists, businesses and government agencies looking to collect online information about a person or connect with long-lost friends or acquaintances.
Sherlock is an open-source, command-line tool developed in Python that searches for a particular username on the most popular social networks and provides links to the profiles. It has no interface and is accessed via a Windows, Linux or MacOS command terminal. For installation guidance and more information, users can check out the Github repository of the Sherlock Project.
Accountanalysis specifically focuses on Twitter and can produce a report that shows an account’s public information, including its followers and followed accounts, frequency of tweets, number of interactions, times of greatest activity, most used hashtags, among others. This data is useful for drawing various conclusions, from learning more about people’s tastes or opinions to checking whether it is an automated user or bot. The tool is also helpful in discovering accounts that have malicious purposes due to their promoting sites with a bad reputation.
Maltego is one of the most powerful tools in the OSINT world. It uses graphs to represent information, which allows users to create relationship diagrams to identify patterns and discover hidden connections. It also stands out for the number of sources it uses. Maltego allows users to integrate different sources of information, such as databases, online search tools, APIs, and so much more. When creating a new graph, users can insert entities or data about the target, such as email or commonly used usernames. Maltego, available for download from the official site, is a desktop application that offers free but limited licensing and unlimited paid versions at both user and corporate levels.
Social media sites also double as powerful resources for intel gathering through search functionalities. Profile search allows researchers to find someone’s profile on social media platforms and view their public activity, while hashtag search enables users to find posts related to the person they are researching. Group search can be used to check if the person is a member of any groups on the social network, providing additional information about their interests and activities. Mention search allows researchers to see if other people are talking about the person and provide more information about their online reputation and relationships.
When using OSINT tools, it is crucial to know the local and national laws and regulations related to the collection and use of public information to avoid committing a crime or violating the privacy of others. It is also important to respect people’s privacy, not collect private or confidential information without their explicit consent, and verify the truthfulness and relevance of the collected information before using it for any purpose. It is also important to take measures to protect collected and stored information against possible theft or data breaches.
OSINT tools for social media research can be very useful, but they also remind us of the importance of protecting information we do not want to be available or that could be used for malicious purposes. Therefore, it is important to be careful about what we post online and avoid oversharing details from our private lives on social media.