Deanon by photo

[Man]

Our world is not only what we see. In this article, we will tell you how to do all this with the help of improvised, accessible and absolutely free means.

Hello everyone, dear friends!

Our world is not only what we see. And sometimes the simplest things can tell a lot or even reveal secrets. And you don't have to be a psychic to do that.

Regular photographs are no exception. A simple photo can tell you a lot, from EXIF information to the position of the sun and camera defects, which can identify the relative time, location and even the photographer, even without metadata.

Deanon by photo is a modern reality. Artificial intelligence systems, processing huge amounts of information, allow recognizing faces and objects, improving image quality, detailing small, unclear objects, such as reflections and shadows, or determining the type and model of the camera or checking photos for editing.

AI systems today are much smarter than those who use them, especially those who use their "droids" and "stubs" for illegal purposes. And often neglecting the rules of basic digital hygiene, these people end up behind bars. And not at all due to the efforts of operative Ebenko, but solely due to their stupidity.

All this has long been part of our daily life. And it is not for nothing that we constantly call on you to be vigilant, dear friends. It is not only the state that is monitoring. A huge amount of open information can be found on the Internet.

In this article, we will tell you how to do all this using available, accessible and absolutely free tools.

Face recognition​

It is no secret that the entire city is filled with cameras, and our faces are recognized in squares, in the subway, in buildings and in public transport, and are compared in real time with various databases. Recognition systems work so well that they are able to recognize a person, even under a mask.

We will talk about how recognition systems work in another article.

Here we will focus on how to recognize people from a photograph without having any data.

The easiest option is black market services. For a price tag of 5,000-20,000 rubles, well-known resources on the darknet will give you not only the person's full name and personal data, but also a map of his movements around the city.

But we talked about how to do everything ourselves, without the help of other people. And here, too, there are more than enough opportunities.

findclone.ru​

The service searches for faces on the Vkontakte social network. The first 25 searches are free, then you have to pay. The quality is average, but it is quite suitable for getting to know the technology.

search4faces.com​

Search4faces is another service for searching people on the Internet by photo. Thanks to neural network technology and machine learning, the service helps find the right person or someone very similar to him or her in a few seconds. The result is a link to the profile of the found person on the social network vk.com or ok.ru and others.

The service currently partially or completely contains 3 databases: avatars of the social network Vkontakte, main photos of the social network Odnoklassniki, profile photos of the social network Vkontakte.

pimeyes.com​

Paid foreign search engine, searches mainly by photos from search engine cache. Works well, but unfortunately you have to pay for the results.

VK.watch​

VK.watch is an OSINT tool for searching for information about people on VKontakte. According to them, their database is the largest archive of historical data on the VK service: user comments, photos, friend lists, and profile changes. A user can be found by a unique ID or by their last nickname. The bulk of the data was collected in 2016, and in August 2018, VK.watch was launched with that same database on a self-sustaining basis. In 2019, it became possible to find people by their faces, like the closed FindFace - just upload a photo here.

Maltego + Social Links​

There is so much written about Maltego that writing anything else would be superfluous. However, for those who are in the tank, I will still conduct a short educational program. Maltego is a tool for building and analyzing connections between various subjects and objects. Maltego allows you to collect information obtained from open and closed sources, it allows you to visualize aggregated data.

How does this benefit us? In combination with paid plugins, this framework provides the maximum capabilities available to a mere mortal for searching and identifying images in any social networks and on the Internet as a whole. There are plenty of articles on how to do this on the Internet. You can also find the necessary versions of Maltego.

Age determination​

There is a good service pictriev

A visual demonstration of the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

Search by images​

Yandex.Images, Google Images, Mail.ru Image Search, Bing.Images.

There are many interesting things you can do with search engines. Don't underestimate their power - their cache contains trillions of images, including those from social networks.

There is nothing complicated, except for having a sample picture to work with the above-mentioned tools, you do not need it. Upload the picture, look for similar ones. Refine the search results. Here is how it works:

But the coolest functionality is provided by the service from Yandex.Images. Try it and you will understand everything yourself.

These same services will help you identify strange objects, devices, plants and animals in photographs. For example, modern technologies allow you to recognize not only that the picture shows a dog, but also what breed it is.

Often, you can also recognize cars, clothing brands, and much more. And all this is absolutely free.

Another service worth mentioning is the TinEye image search service, although it has lost ground recently.

Here are a few more services that will make your social media OSINT easier:

https://map.snapchat.com
http://snradar.azurewebsites.net
https://intelx.io/tools?tab=location
https://twitter.com/search-advanced
https://montage.meedan. com/welcome
https://mattw.io/youtube-geofind/location
https://www.osintcombine.com/instagram-explorer

Frameworks, clouds and other software​

You can recognize faces both on the basis of huge frameworks from Google and Microsoft, and openly available on github, parsing social network data is also not at all difficult. Start now and in a year, maybe you will open your own face search service, who knows.

For example, the ready-made face recognition service from Melkomyagkih writes about its service like this: implement the face recognition function in your applications for convenient and reliable interaction with users. No experience with machine learning is required. The following functions are available: face detection, which identifies faces and their attributes in an image; personal identification, which allows you to find a match with a specific person in a private repository where data is stored for up to 1 million people; emotion recognition, which allows you to identify various facial expressions, such as joy, disgust, indifference or fear; recognition and grouping of similar faces in images.

Compiling a photofit online​

Here is a simple service that will allow you to create a photofit of a person the old-fashioned way without downloading any additional software.

Improving the quality of snickers​

As we have already seen, artificial intelligence can recognize faces in a crowd and even “remove masks.” But there are even more opportunities in terms of improving the quality of images and supplementing them with missing details.

For example, the Let's Enhance service allows you to significantly improve the quality of even very bad images and even bring them to print quality using AI technologies even at 16x magnification.

And the online service pinkmirror.com retouches photos no worse than a professional.

Photo processing​

remove.bg allows you to remove the background from any image, leaving only people or objects in the foreground. This processing allows you to more accurately select faces or objects for further search.

Image Metadata​

The photo file often (that is, if it has not been forcibly deleted) contains information about the circumstances of the shooting, including a geotag.

The old-fashioned custom of captioning photos in paper albums has undergone a dramatic change. Nowadays, you no longer need to add a comment to a photo yourself - the camera (especially on a smartphone or tablet), the application in which you processed it, and, in addition, the Internet service to which you uploaded your photo will do it for you.

One of the main "collectors" of metadata is the EXIF block, added to graphic files. The Exchangeable Image File Format standard was developed by the Japanese Electronics and IT Industry Association (JEITA), its first version was published in 1995. EXIF is intended for graphic formats JPEG and TIFF. Files of other popular formats, such as PNG and GIF, can also contain similar metadata - in particular, according to the XMP standard developed by Adobe. In addition, camera manufacturers use their own metadata formats, partly duplicating EXIF.

Metadata “forgotten” in photo files has often backfired on the authors or actors involved. One of the most striking examples is the arrest of John McAfee in Guatemala in 2012. While hiding from the investigation into the murder of his neighbor, McAfee gave an interview to Vice, illustrated with a photograph.

The metadata of this photo gave away John McAfee : the geotag found in the photo file helped law enforcement find and capture the fugitive.

Well, it's time to move on to experiments - check popular Internet services for what they do with EXIF. For this, we used a Firefox browser plugin - Exif Viewer 2.00. The plugin shows metadata of images on web pages and the local computer, is integrated with mapping services to display the shooting location and shows built-in thumbnails.

By the way, you can experiment with the services that we haven’t gotten around to yet – it’s extremely simple and quite exciting.

The Short Journey from an Internet Photo to a Real-World Place

• This is what our inspection showed:

Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte - metadata is removed from photos;
Google+ - does not delete;
Instagram - deletes ;
Flickr, Google Photo, Tumblr - do not delete;
eBay, Craigslist - remove;
CIAN - does not remove.

By the way, using geotags on CIAN, you can identify dishonest realtors who post photos of other apartments in their ads (of course, if they haven't deleted EXIF themselves). Services that don't delete metadata usually have a privacy setting that allows you to turn off their display. But it's display: the service can still save this data separately. And this topic deserves a separate discussion.

By the way, metadata stores not only text information, but also a thumbnail of the image that contains it. And sometimes problems can arise with them.

While getting to know the history of EXIF, we came across one remarkable case. In 2003, American TV presenter Catherine Schwartz posted seemingly innocuous photos of herself on her blog. However, the metadata of these files contained thumbnails of the original photos, showing the full image before the cropping procedure. And yes, in two of them, Schwartz appeared naked.

But it's been more than a decade since then, and the developers have probably already dealt with the obvious privacy threat, right? Well, it wouldn't hurt to check, just in case.

After testing Adobe Photoshop Express, GIMP, Windows Paint, Microsoft Office Picture Manager, IrfanView and XnView, we found that the thumbnail was updated when editing the image.

Another test subject was the latest version of Corel PHOTO-PAINT editor. It suddenly turned out that when saving a JPG file, the thumbnail is not updated, showing the original image, albeit in a reduced form!

PHOTO-PAINT has a function for preparing an image for publication on the Web (Export For Web). Perhaps this operation would at least clean up the metadata, we thought, but no.

In general, Catherine Schwartz's experience can be replicated in our time. For reference: Corel PHOTO-PAINT is positioned as an "advanced photo editor" and a "professional application".

• In order not to “expose” something extra along with the photographs, not intended for other people’s eyes, we offer a selection of the most obvious, in general, tips:

1. Disable location saving on your device (for the camera only or for all apps at once).
2. Remove metadata from files before publishing them online. For example, XnView, a free tool for personal, non-commercial use, can do this. But the built-in Windows mechanism “Remove properties and personal information” (called in the file properties window on the “Details” tab) actually leaves both the thumbnail and the EXIF blocks.
3. You can also delete photo metadata before sending it to the Internet directly on your mobile device. For example, here are applications for iOS, Android.
4. In the privacy settings of network services, prohibit them from saving photo metadata.

The most hardcore for those who really have something to lose: do not send photos or data to the Internet that may be useful to your ill-wishers. That is, do not publish anything at all that, in certain circumstances, can be used against you.

Extracting Metadata​

As I wrote above, metadata contains a lot of interesting information for an OSINT specialist, from geolocation to camera shutter speed and other photographic nuances, comparing which you can say a lot.

Let's take this photo. What else can be said about it except the genuine joy of a man's liberation after 7 years of captivity?

• Let's start with the fotoforensics.com service (refuses to work from a Russian IP). What can it tell us? Better take a look yourself:

As we can see, quite a lot. By comparing these data, we can say a lot, even about what was left behind the scenes.

• Approximately the same information can be obtained online and here .
• And if the picture contained geodata, the pic2map service will show the place where the photo was taken directly on the map.
• The services IMG online and metapicz.com will tell you roughly the same thing.
• But the services http://www.cameratrace.com/trace and Stolen Camera Finder will allow you to find out the serial number of the camera with which the photo was taken, which, as you understand, can sometimes serve as a serious argument, or even evidence.
• And the service https://29a.ch/photo-forensics will allow you to check photos for editing.
• For example, by entering the time of a photograph that was taken outdoors in sunlight, using the SunCalc service and simple calculations, you can fairly accurately determine where this photograph was taken.
• geocreepy.com asks you to simply enter the profile of the person you are interested in, and… voila! The map shows where and when the user was.

Recovering text from "washed out" screenshots​

But specifically against those who like to “blur” rather than delete text on screenshots and other images, a completely free and open source program called Depix has been created, which allows you to restore even the most blurred text.

Hollywood movies love to exaggerate. They zoom in on photos a million times — and derive numbers from a single pixel. Although it’s unbelievable, scientific research in this area has been going on for a long time. Theoretical works and PoCs on restoring text from blurred images were published back in the 90s.

Despite the fairly good development of science in this area, there has not yet been a specialized tool specifically for restoring text after pixelation. The Depix program is the first such tool. And it works.

And this is just the beginning​

As we can see, there are a huge number of ways to de-anonymize a person online. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned and we will keep you updated.