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In this previous article, we took a walk through the life of an OSINT investigator, talking about strategies and ways to preserve your mental health while working online. Investigator life can be a pretty varied topic though. So today we’re back to talk about disinformation, OSINT and considerations when investigating online.

Why Do It Though?

Sometimes, offline discussions turn to work matters and one question that’s often asked is why OSINT investigations can be an important part of assessing an event or incident and what exactly they uncover or contribute to any given discussion.

It’s a fair question all things considered, but it does spark some interesting conversation around social media and the proliferation of things like social media intelligence (SOCMINT) and analysis.

In a world filled with fake news and bad actors trying to push a narrative credible, open-source investigations contribute much to online discussion. During MH-17 for instance, social media analysis would eventually identify the missile launcher responsible as it moved through Ukraine. Then, after the missile was fired, further research would identify it travelling back into Russia, with one missile conspicuously absent from the launcher.

With BUK (SA-11) systems using external rails, the launcher travelling with one missile absent was quite distinctive. Here’s an entire SA-11 launcher that shows the rail system. Source: Wikipedia

Unfortunately, though, it’s not always good news, and we have more than a few incidents to remind us of the importance of respecting the information we gather as well as not leaping to any conclusions right off the bat.

The best example of this would be Reddit and the Boston Bombing that occurred in the mid-2010s. Crowd-sourced data would reveal a possible target of interest quite early in the event. This person, who had nothing to do with the incident became the focus of an intense discussion that would last for some time before it was eventually revealed that the community had been too quick to tag that person of interest as someone involved with the event.

Pictures of the suspects would circulate early on Reddit. Source: Wikipedia

With OSINT becoming a pretty popular hobby in recent years, it’s important to remember that often, we’ll deal with sensitive information and how we deal with that plays a huge part in ethical considerations during an inquiry.

With most people valuing transparency, OSINT inquiries offer a peer-reviewed way of reviewing critical events and incidents that are often very difficult to cover up. Given that bad actors love secrecy, it’s a great way of returning this power to the people.

What Can We Find?

As you’d expect, events that are typically newsworthy seem to get a lot of attention from amateur sleuths and on the flip side, bad actors too. Given that everyone likes a good mystery, this is hardly a surprising find.

One thing that is surprising though is the type of disinformation that can propagate through social media with near ease, and it’s also no surprise to find that advanced AI-powered image generation tools play a large role in allowing this to occur.

AI generation tools make it far easier to spread propaganda. However, some are easy to spot….for now. Source: x.com

A great example of this would occur during the recent extreme weather events that would be faced by the United States. Inflammatory tweets would rapidly spread disinformation and despite their ability to be easily debunked, some people simply weren’t having it and brought into the drama regardless.

Basic Strategies

The reality is that to fight disinformation you don’t exactly have to be a super sleuth all the time. In fact, just a few simple tricks can easily up your game and get you used to hunting and busting disinformation.

For example, simply knowing how to reverse image search on platforms like Tineye will help you uncover information that might have been recycled or used on the internet previously.

Alternately, taking a close look at imagery can also help uncover disinformation. While image generation capabilities are rapidly improving many systems still struggle with rendering the small details like fingers, hands or even house or vehicle features.

So if an image doesn’t quite look right, it’s worth examining it in further detail to see what you’ll find. We should expect that in the future though, this will become harder to spot as image-generation tools improve.

It’s also worth touching briefly on the concept of reputation. While this shouldn’t be the only point of consideration, the fact is that quite often, the most prolific spreaders of disinformation are in fact, repeat offenders.

Because of this, if you’ve identified disinformation from an account before and you see the same type of thing again later on, it’s often much easier to identify it the second time.

Don’t let this be the sole gauge though, because while there are plenty of obvious fakes, there are also some extremely well-crafted sock puppets in play that can be pretty difficult to catch out.

Final Words

The average human is for the most part, quite trusting and it’s this trust that disinformation and propaganda strategies aim to exploit. They aim to do it by using something that few people understand. The dreaded social media algorithm.

This helps content move through the social media ecosystem and be amplified by accounts of interest, using the algorithm to ensure that the content is regularly presented to the type of users that will engage with it.

So to effectively identify and find disinformation we need to go against the advice of most therapists and start applying a level of suspicion to the content that we consume online.

In english? This is probably one of the few situations where having a healthy element of mistrust will actually take you a long way.

While social media can and will proliferate with news regarding current events, you can rest assured, that for some time to come, disinformation strategies will be lurking close behind.

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