OSINT - Sock Puppets, Search Engine Operators
dorking ftw
So this is starting with two things this week:
My personal experience with walking through some sock puppet creation (okay mostly about cell phones tbh)
Search engine operators
Both parts will be mostly me sharing what it is I’ve learned and/or have been doing (as per usual).
Firstly. I realized. Very quickly that you can really go stupidly deep in how much you want to set up sock puppet accounts. All the way down to burner phones. The rest of it is relatively easy but It’s all pretty wild. Look at this article if you want a decent primer on steps: reddit url
I did notice that mint mobile is nowhere near as cheap as it once was, at $45 a month, it’s actually quite expensive all things considered. It might be much more cost effective to buy something like an unlocked moto g from amazon (about $100-$150), and then use whatever sim you can buy. Both tello, SpeedTalk, and Ultra mobile offer pretty cheap plans compared to mint mobile (just looks on amazon). I think tracefone still offer a couple plans but they may or may not be compatible.
I think tracfone and boost mobile also offer pretty cheap phones you can probably buy when their sales drop.
The only catch is that some moto g’s VoLTE is not compatable with xfinity or spectrum. Which may not be much of a big deal, but it’s something to keep in mind if you like their services. The other catch with TraceFone now is that most of their devices are locked, so you’re stuck with them and can’t just yeet any old sim without starting the unlocking process (or doing it yourself). P.S. supposedly, you can start the unlocking with most wireless companies by calling them and asking you want your phone to be unlocked from their network. I’m not entirely sure if it works for TracFone or not.
Locked phones are also generally cheaper than their unlocked counterparts. But again, you may not be able to easily change out the sim (also lookout for eSim only enable phones, you don’t want those necessarily).
Locked Motorola:
Unlocked Motorola:
Locked phones will also occasionally force you onto a contract for X/month. Do so at your own discretion (and convenience).
Search Engine Operators:
Getting back to the original point of the article. Let’s talk a little over search engine operators.
Ironically this is the section that I’ve done the most so far but really have the least amount to say besides: Learn, practice, and improve.
google is oftentimes going to be your best bet for just general dorking/advanced search queries. sites like yandex, bing, etc. can also be good, but have more limited use cases comparatively. One caveat is bing does seem to let you search technical articles/information that google may otherwise block at times (like page information, certain pdf’s, etc.). Most types of query operators like AND, OR, and ““ also seem to be the same across the different search engines.
Oh! Something really cool I learned is that you can use wildcards and remove items from a search like this:
the * machine - this will search anything/multiple characters between ‘the’ and ‘machine’
the * m?chine - this will do the same except also subsitute a single character where the ‘?’ is.
"algorand" the * protocol -defi
this will exclude the word defi from our results
Here’s a link for wildcards if you want to read a little more on it: Wildcards
Also, don’t forget to look at the tools section. It can give you timeframe to sort your results. This can help if you’re trying to find something recent or specifically older (say within the last 6 months or > a few years).
Tools location:
Options to select based on a time range:
Lastly, I wanted to make sure you could find advanced search (you just have to open “tools” to see it):
This is helpful when you’re just learned and if you prefer the gui for the time being. Over days, weeks and months though, the search operators will become second nature (at least hopefully)
That’s it for today. Onto some other cool things.