linuskay/osint-challenges

A collection of my Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) Challenges

Introduction

A collection of my Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) challenges. There are a range of differing skill levels, and anyone is encouraged to give them a go.

Each folder contains one challenge, the required files, and a solution.

What is OSINT?

Open-Source Intelligence, often shortened to OSINT, is the practice of collecting and analysing publicly available information with the goal of uncovering actionable intelligence.

"Publicly available information" can refer to anything that is accessible by the general public, which is probably you. Posts and profiles on social media accounts, vehicle registration databases, Google Maps, phone books, file metadata, or websites are just some examples.

This process should generally involve passive information collection, and be non-invasive. This means sourcing data without direct interaction with any entities. I touch on this lightly in the disclaimers further down this document.

Lets say you have an image of a street, and you want to find out where it was taken. You might notice a company logo in a window, find the company's website, track down their store locations and crossreference that with any other features in the image.

Or, you have a photo of a train approaching a station with red wooden buildings, in a scene awash in snow. You might research the distinct type of train, crossreferencing it with a mirriad of detailed information from train fanatics online, and notice that it only runs in a specific train line in a specific scandinavian country. Then you may spend a good amount of time investigating each station on the line, comparing the building placement with the ones pictured until you find your target. You might even go so far as to track down the original Youtube video the image was taken from. This was a real challenge from a CTF back in 2020, one of my favourites, which had my friends and I huddled over a laptop for hours.

These examples talk specifically about image-based OSINT, mostly because its my favourite kind (i wont deny my biases), but its not always the case.

Why OSINT?

OSINT is frequently included as part of heopardy-style Capture The Flag competitions, where teams compete to solve challenges. Some of these are worth a lot of points, and are very fun, so its worthwhile to not miss out.

OSINT has also been used in the process of locating missing persons throughout the world. For a personal example, in 2020 I had the opportunity to participate in the National Missing Persons Hackathon. During this event, participants were provided a collection of real missing persons cases, and scoured the Internet for any potential leads, which were passed on to federal police. This generated a high volume of leads, and it was inspiring to see so many people work towards a positive common goal. This is commonly referred to as "OSINT for good".

Happy hunting!

Some loose sources:

• https://www.sans.org/blog/what-is-open-source-intelligence/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence

Disclaimers

Many of the images used are of public places, and challenges may contain the information of real businesses. In the event you come across any information, engage with it passively, and do not attempt to contact or tamper with any people, infrastructure or media.

I also generally do not encourage anybody to infringe on anyone's privacy with the skills required for these challenges. Leave people alone unless they give you permission.

These challenges are free to use, but attribution is requested in any public setting.