2023-12-09 –, Clappy Monkey Track
Being a similar age to the WWW, I've grown up using it and freely providing it my personal data without knowing any better. In this session we’ll jump into the field of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and explain how it can be leveraged to understand your digital footprint on the internet. As part of the session we’ll discuss the various sites, tools and learning resources that can be used when investigating the spider web of information that is publicly available about people and explore what sort of data I found in my own personal investigation. Ultimately, I hope this talk will provide a potent example of the old adage ‘the internet never forgets’.
This talk is a personal look at my journey into the world of OSINT and how I’ve used it to better understand my digital footprint and reduce the findability of my personal data. I stared my journey with just a name and photo of myself and from that small set of information I set out to explore what else I could uncover. Join me as I explore and detail the techniques, tools and services that allowed me to uncover more publicly available personal data about myself than I ever expected to find.
By the end of the talk you will have learnt about a wide range of OSINT areas to explore such as: web archives, personal websites/blogs, search engines, domain names, git metadata, file metadata, data breaches, linking data sources and social networks. Hopefully, empowered with this information you’ll be able to explore your own digital footprint and maybe think twice about what data you give to the internet and what data you have given historically.
Thomas Preece is a Lead Architect working in the BBC handling security within the BBC’s digital estate. His focus is around building security community, technical security education and giving developers the tools they need to create secure systems and ensure they continue to be secure.