The gut of the Internet reveals a lot of information, for people who know how to dig

Stealing? Hacking? No, just the exploitation of freely accessible digital data, carried out by Epieos, the young company of Sylvain Hajri, invited this week to the International Cybersecurity Forum (FIC) in Lille in the north of France, with beautiful flowers of French Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).

From any email address, Epieos is able to find out which services and applications are used at this address, as well as the time of the last connection, all without violating any law of France or the general conditions of use. .

Epieos is an example of the full range of digital detectives, for their work or on a voluntary basis, who are constantly searching the bowels of the Internet to gather information, for a variety of purposes.

A very diversified use of this research

Of my clients, I have many law enforcement, intelligence companies, insuranceexplanation by Sylvain Hajri.

But I also have a client who specializes in placing artificial turf who wants to identify who, among his potential clients, previously published negative reviews, to avoid contracting with them …

Artus Huot of Saint-Albin uses open source investigation for the clients of his company that specializes in economic intelligence, Axis & Co.

Find the culprits of the fraud

To identify the person guilty of a text message scam, he started with the phone number in the fake message.

He found various nicknames associated with phone numbers on WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, then bounced to other apps like Roblox (video games).

One thing leading up to another, the photos made it possible to identify relatives, thanks especially to the terrific facial recognition application PimEyes.

The scammer was eventually identified, along with his address in Bulgaria and his Italian passport number, thanks to a company register.

You need to have a methodology so as not to get lost in this labyrinth, explains Arthus Huot from Saint-Albin, who used the equivalent of a day’s work to fulfill his mission.

This open source information is so rich that the Israeli company Cellebrite decided to market a service for automating this research.

Intended primarily for police and intelligence services, this service can automatically compare data from a wide variety of sources, in particular publications on social networks, to conduct research on a theme. or a person.

Our platform has hundreds of sources, but you can add additional sources if you wish.explanation by Arie Ben-Dayan, of Cellebrite.

Citizen use

Others use web mining for civic purposes. OpenFacto is a young French NGO that now brings together nearly 400 volunteers.

To his credit, for example, a report in 2020 on violations of the Libyan arms embargo by the people of Turkey, conducted only on open sources.

The investigation used all publicly available databases: MarineTraffic (ship tracking), FlightRadar (air traffic tracking), Equasis (ship ownership information), SentinelHub (satellite images), records of company and more. of course the photos published on social networks.

We try to identify people who put themselves on stage, we bet a lot on human stupidityexplained Hervé Letoqueux, one of the founders of the association.

So, can we find everything on the Internet? No, of course not, answer all these people, emphasizing in chorus the need to verify information obtained elsewhere than on the Web.

Be careful, you are going to a very slippery place, because you are very exposed to all kinds of manipulationwarns General Serge Cholley, former director of French military intelligence (DRM) and now director of security for Eutelsat (satellite telecommunications).

I am the witness, and I am the actorhe said. Daesh [acronyme arabe pour l’État islamique]they are not partridges of the year and yet they are well managed by false digital traces left by French services.