What is in my name to you: how to “pierce” a person on the Internet qualitatively?
We constantly meet in our lives with new people, and it is worth noting that, in addition to good friends, we come across muddy comrades, and sometimes notorious scammers. The love of our fellow citizens to leave their mark on the Internet and the efforts of our IT companies to automate everything and everyone allow us to fairly quickly collect interesting information about specific people from open sources. To do this quickly and efficiently, we need to own a simple methodology of intelligence work and know where and what information about a person can be obtained on the Internet.
An accessible model of the work of any intelligence service is the so-called intelligence cycle. Below is an illustration of a cycle taken from the FBI site.
We can creatively translate and group a little differently and get the following steps:
Take this model into service and adapt for our good purposes the verification of unscrupulous comrades.
')
Usually the task of checking a person is put like this: “We need to collect all the information about this person!” In fact, most often we are interested in knowing his biography, psychological portrait, circle of acquaintances.
Without a plan for searching and analyzing data, we will look at the screen for a long time and sadly and send to the search engines various queries containing nuggets of known data about our target. If we are lucky, we will be able to catch something, if not - then we will waste time trying to shake up the entire Internet.
How to plan our actions?
1) We need to collect everything that is currently known: name, photo, phone, field of activity, friends, etc. etc. As a rule, the most valuable information is the nickname used by a person on the Internet (most often it can be obtained, knowing the personal e-mail address).
2) We need to formulate working hypotheses to search for data based on the available information. For example:
Note. A talented scout should be able to switch between two states: unrestrained creativity and terrible tediousness. In the first case, we throw in hypotheses for verification, and in the second we check them carefully: we find information and reject hypotheses in case of discrepancies.
3) Having working hypotheses, we think over which sources of data we can be useful in this easy case of bringing to the clear water.
On the surface are the following sources of interesting information:
Comment. Knowing the nickname, you can quickly see in which social networks there are relevant pages. To do this, there are special services to check the availability of pages, for example, namechk.com User-forgotten accounts are sometimes much more interesting than current ones.
A powerful source of information can be a search engine, but to get the most out of it, a novice scout needs to master the so-called advanced search operators , among which some of the most useful are: “”, -, cache, site :, filetype :, but this is a topic for a separate article.
In this case, the collection of data will consist in forming requests to the reviewed sources and saving the results for current and subsequent comparison and analysis. It can be very useful in the process of such an exercise to open a text editor and consistently save the detected data into it (screenshots, text, photos, etc.).
Sometimes to get valuable information you need to dig into the raw data. Examples of processing can be:
1. Testing hypotheses . Collecting information bit by bit, we immediately analyze it, and here hypotheses and their viability testing can again be useful. Comparing with them the revealed facts, indirect signs, logical conclusions from the facts, it is possible to determine the most likely hypothesis.
2. Elementary data operations: sorting, element matching, etc. can open up a lot of interesting. For example, you can download the lists of friends of friends of a person of interest and, by comparing them, determine the communities and structures to which a person of interest may have. In this difficult task, Excel can help us with its possibility of conditional formatting in case of coincidence of elements.
3. Analysis of photo and video images . From an experienced eye of a novice Internet intelligence officer, not only those who accidentally got into the frame will not go away: the view from the window, a part of the name of a geographical point or a piquant reflection in the mirror in the background, but also various non-verbal signals that will allow to judge a person
4. Analysis of the content of texts of a person of interest or his interlocutors. Pay attention to how a person describes his attitude to others, what his friends write about him. Here, of course, you should not only be able to read carefully, but also know various kinds of subtleties, for example, that you can search for mentions on VKontakte's social network using the following URL query: vk.com/feed?obj=ID&q=§ion = mentions , where ID is the user ID, which you can find out by hovering the cursor, for example, on the “Send message” button: the numbers in the link will be its ID.
5. Analysis of likes. Some put likes to everything they see, you never get a like from someone, but mostly people are quite selective in this matter and it’s very interesting to see the statistics of who or what collects maximum likes from our person. It's good that services are emerging that allow this interesting analysis process to be automated, for example, such as searchlikes.ru
The topic of information analysis is very extensive and interesting, and we will return to it more than once in future articles.
Real scouts write a lot, because they work for the state. We, however, since we are engaged in such things solely for personal purposes and within the framework of the law, do not need to write reports. Nevertheless, it is very useful to practice writing the process of analysis and its results, since we can thereby develop logical thinking and acquire skills in analyzing textual and numerical information.
So, we reviewed the process of collecting and analyzing information about a particular person on the Internet, using the model of the intelligence cycle and knowledge of where there is interesting data on the Internet.
UPDATE:
The next article focuses on how to “break through” a whole group of users of a social network (using a practical example): Internet intelligence in action: who is Mr./Ms. Habraman?
How does intelligence work?
An accessible model of the work of any intelligence service is the so-called intelligence cycle. Below is an illustration of a cycle taken from the FBI site.
We can creatively translate and group a little differently and get the following steps:
- Problem statement / problem statement;
- Planning;
- Data collection;
- Data processing;
- Information analysis;
- Report preparation and presentation of results.
Take this model into service and adapt for our good purposes the verification of unscrupulous comrades.
')
Step 1. Task setting
Usually the task of checking a person is put like this: “We need to collect all the information about this person!” In fact, most often we are interested in knowing his biography, psychological portrait, circle of acquaintances.
Step 2. Planning
Without a plan for searching and analyzing data, we will look at the screen for a long time and sadly and send to the search engines various queries containing nuggets of known data about our target. If we are lucky, we will be able to catch something, if not - then we will waste time trying to shake up the entire Internet.
How to plan our actions?
1) We need to collect everything that is currently known: name, photo, phone, field of activity, friends, etc. etc. As a rule, the most valuable information is the nickname used by a person on the Internet (most often it can be obtained, knowing the personal e-mail address).
2) We need to formulate working hypotheses to search for data based on the available information. For example:
- A person works in a company that sells compound feed, whose name ends with “VA”: we saw a photo from the exhibition and were able to view part of the company name.
- Age from 30 to 40: rated by voice or description.
- Is friends with such a man.
- etc.
Note. A talented scout should be able to switch between two states: unrestrained creativity and terrible tediousness. In the first case, we throw in hypotheses for verification, and in the second we check them carefully: we find information and reject hypotheses in case of discrepancies.
3) Having working hypotheses, we think over which sources of data we can be useful in this easy case of bringing to the clear water.
On the surface are the following sources of interesting information:
- Social networks VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. (lots of interesting information: photos, geo, friends, interests, contacts, psychological portrait, etc.).
- Sites of courts (if we know the name and place of registration, we can find out if a person is suing on the basis of the website of a particular court).
- The base of invalid passports ( http://services.fms.gov.ru/info-service.htm?sid=2000 ).
- The base of bailiffs: should not our comrade of what? ( http://fssprus.ru/iss/ip/ ).
- Base diplomas ( http://frdocheck.obrnadzor.gov.ru ).
- Google with Yandex.
Comment. Knowing the nickname, you can quickly see in which social networks there are relevant pages. To do this, there are special services to check the availability of pages, for example, namechk.com User-forgotten accounts are sometimes much more interesting than current ones.
A powerful source of information can be a search engine, but to get the most out of it, a novice scout needs to master the so-called advanced search operators , among which some of the most useful are: “”, -, cache, site :, filetype :, but this is a topic for a separate article.
Step 3. Data collection
In this case, the collection of data will consist in forming requests to the reviewed sources and saving the results for current and subsequent comparison and analysis. It can be very useful in the process of such an exercise to open a text editor and consistently save the detected data into it (screenshots, text, photos, etc.).
Step 4. Data processing
Sometimes to get valuable information you need to dig into the raw data. Examples of processing can be:
- Extract metadata from documents (authorship, GPS coordinates).
- Bringing the download of data from social networks to a form with which you can work, for example, in the same Excel.
- etc.
Step 5. Analysis of information
1. Testing hypotheses . Collecting information bit by bit, we immediately analyze it, and here hypotheses and their viability testing can again be useful. Comparing with them the revealed facts, indirect signs, logical conclusions from the facts, it is possible to determine the most likely hypothesis.
| Facts / Judgments | Hypothesis 1 | Hypothesis 2 | Hypothesis 3 | Hypothesis 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fact 1 | + | + | + | + |
| Fact 2 | - | + | + | + |
| Proposition 1 | - | - | + | + |
| Fact 3 | - | - | - | + |
2. Elementary data operations: sorting, element matching, etc. can open up a lot of interesting. For example, you can download the lists of friends of friends of a person of interest and, by comparing them, determine the communities and structures to which a person of interest may have. In this difficult task, Excel can help us with its possibility of conditional formatting in case of coincidence of elements.
3. Analysis of photo and video images . From an experienced eye of a novice Internet intelligence officer, not only those who accidentally got into the frame will not go away: the view from the window, a part of the name of a geographical point or a piquant reflection in the mirror in the background, but also various non-verbal signals that will allow to judge a person
- facial creases revealing the prevailing human emotion;
- favorite gestures;
- nature of relationships with other people, etc.
4. Analysis of the content of texts of a person of interest or his interlocutors. Pay attention to how a person describes his attitude to others, what his friends write about him. Here, of course, you should not only be able to read carefully, but also know various kinds of subtleties, for example, that you can search for mentions on VKontakte's social network using the following URL query: vk.com/feed?obj=ID&q=§ion = mentions , where ID is the user ID, which you can find out by hovering the cursor, for example, on the “Send message” button: the numbers in the link will be its ID.
5. Analysis of likes. Some put likes to everything they see, you never get a like from someone, but mostly people are quite selective in this matter and it’s very interesting to see the statistics of who or what collects maximum likes from our person. It's good that services are emerging that allow this interesting analysis process to be automated, for example, such as searchlikes.ru
The topic of information analysis is very extensive and interesting, and we will return to it more than once in future articles.
Step 6. Report preparation and presentation of results.
Real scouts write a lot, because they work for the state. We, however, since we are engaged in such things solely for personal purposes and within the framework of the law, do not need to write reports. Nevertheless, it is very useful to practice writing the process of analysis and its results, since we can thereby develop logical thinking and acquire skills in analyzing textual and numerical information.
Instead of conclusion
So, we reviewed the process of collecting and analyzing information about a particular person on the Internet, using the model of the intelligence cycle and knowledge of where there is interesting data on the Internet.
UPDATE:
The next article focuses on how to “break through” a whole group of users of a social network (using a practical example): Internet intelligence in action: who is Mr./Ms. Habraman?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/319334/
All Articles