New Year, Same Me!
New Year, New House, New Tracelabs OSINT Party
Well 2022 has been a busy start! We’ve moved into a new house which even when things go smoothly is incredibly stressful! My partner, Andrea, The Beautiful One as I like to call her, has been suffering with COVID too. Luckily not too bad as we both got the vaccines as soon as they were available. Weirdly I myself am yet to have it and every test done, both lateral flow and PCR, have come out negative! Nonetheless, I have stayed inside, just in case. I would hate to put someone with a weakened immune system at risk, just in case the test is wrong, or I’m a non-symptomatic carrier. It doesn’t take a lot to avoid being an arsehole, imho.
Anyhow, that’s all done now - and we’ve also moved in to our new place. It’s in a pretty good shape but we have some things that just need doing! The Beautiful One has been pulling plugs out the walls and sanding the floors (along with Hanover Flooring who were amazing). I’ve taken a section of wall that was looking a bit rough. Stripped the wallpaper from it, sugar soaked, bleached, sanded, polyfillered, sanded, repainted! I’m pretty happy with it tbh! For now that’s it, more to do later but we’ll live in it for now and see what else annoys us enough to do. Sadly I had to pull out of the Brighton Half Marathon this year as we were moving house incredibly close to the race and really my strength was needed to move stuff. There will be other years though!
But that’s not all we’ve been doing! Because the 26th March means another Tracelabs CTF party and another outing for Team Vertical Interference!! Tada!
This time The Beautiful One and I were joined by two others. The Infosec Phoenix is someone that I hugely respect and has recently started a new role in OSINT full time, which is amazing. A few months back in November I did an OSINT challenge to raise money towards Infostep 2021, where I would pledge a donation on their winner of the challenge’s behalf if they could locate exactly where I was. The OSINT work done was really good - you can find a writeup she did here! The other person joining us was Darren who was giving this a go for the first time.
As a team we had only formed on the 24th March so two days before the event. Vertical Interference itself (Just The Beautiful One and I) had only had one outing a few months ago for the ConINT Tracelabs Search Party. I shared some advice as a prep checklist which others may find useful, if they ever want to do it:
A VPN is important to hide your location. For the Trace Labs missing persons CTF it's a really good idea that your location can't be traced. You don't know who you might annoy by finding someone you're preventing from being trafficked. Two good ones are Mullvad & Proton VPN.
Create sock accounts. Although the Trace Labs CTF is "no touch". That is you can't force password resets or interact directly with people to find information, creating a sock is a good idea so that you don't taint your own social media accounts later. "People you may know" suggestions work by assessing who you interact with so if your picture starts appearing among friends then it's a bit of a giveaway.
On off is a great app to give a spoof mobile phone number to use for sock accounts when creating. This means you don't need to use a personal phone number and have it traced back to you easily. Be aware there are methods of knowing who you are though.
Download the Trace Labs VM. There are loads of really good tools to help with your investigation
Do all your investigations off a clone VM and destroy after the investigation. That way you can't go back to it later. Some of the things you might see are harrowing and by destroying it allows you to let go.
Prepare mentally. The subjects in the Trace Labs CTF are real missing people. The work you do is trying to find real missing people, and those people include children. They include people that you might find have endured horrific things that they've escaped, or may have been kidnapped and are currently enduring horrific things.
As always, I highly rate this talk from Nicole Beckwith before anyone does any OSINT to prepare you too.
The Missing Persons Search Party was 4 hours long and there were 6 people to find. I think we found some great stuff and ended cup coming a very resettable 56th! Everyone in the team contributed amazingly, even if they may not felt it at the time. All contributions are good, don’t feel pressure just keep practicing. One of our team even had to deal with a flat tire early on! Amazing that they were able to contribute after all that! All of these awesome contributions helps to find real missing people so well done to all the teams, the judges and the organisers at Tracelabs. Fantastic work.
