WolfyMaster

An Afternoon at the Beach

Introduction

Paul Sherer

Paul Sherer

#Entrepreneur, #Developer, #Businessman. Pouring everything I have into everything that I do. Meeting #opportunity at the door.


An Afternoon at the Beach

Posted by Paul Sherer on .
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An Afternoon at the Beach

Posted by Paul Sherer on .

The internet is such a wonderful, scary place. As a young child I was perplexed by its vastness and the endless amount of things I could discover and learn. One of the early fascinations I had with the internet was the amount of information it contained on people I knew. Seemingly, the internet knew more than I did about some of my closest friends! In the days of AIM, Messenger, and ICQ, I conducted a brief experiment where I attempted to solicit as much information as possible from friends while acting as a random stranger in the chatrooms. The conclusion I found was that people were way too willing to divulge information that allowed me to correctly identify not only their identity, but other detailed information such as current location, address, or even their pet’s name.

It may have been seventh or eighth grade when I really realized the breadth of personal information I could pull together across the internet with little to nothing to begin. Given only a first name I was able to locate the home phone number of a student from a different school district. In hindsight, that was literally child’s play in comparison of some of the tactics and situations I’ve navigated over the last 15 years.

What many might be surprised to know is that a lot of information is publicly available that when pooled together can paint a pretty vivid picture of an individual. For things which aren’t of public record, your friends, family, work, or children will graciously provide on your behalf with or without your knowledge. Over the years I’ve used property records, phone records, birth records, marriage records, newspaper archives, school records, social media, google maps, and much more to compile information on subjects. I’ve been able to identify relatives, birthdays, addresses, names, work history, emails, allergies, pets, education and more. In a way, I have conducted my own background checks from sometimes nothing more than a name, email, or in this most recent case, a photo of an unknown subject.

Background:

Our subject appears in YouTube videos, but has been very intentional of never revealing their true identify. During a livestream, I challenged myself to identify the real name of this person and their employer. I know they work in Human Resources as a consultant and the company deals with technology. I know they are approx. 30 years old and currently reside in the Utah/Colorado area. They have several dogs and enjoy outdoor activities like rock climbing and hiking. They have a sister. Their parents also reside in the Utah/Colorado area.

Building the Profile:

Situations when you don’t have a name are reasonably more difficult than when you do have a name or known alias the individual has used. Even screennames are often reused verbatim or slightly altered yet still provide a good starting point. What I did have in addition to the background information was access to video footage of the subject. Close up footage of their face. So naturally, I screen shot during the livestream a clear image of the subject’s face and cropped it. I ran it through a few reverse image searches, but because this wasn’t an exact copy of an actual image, I figured the results would be limited, and they were. But, it’s 2020 and AI is all the rage and people have so graciously created platforms which scour the internet for images and allow you to search for similar images using AI. Bingo.

The search yielded some results that I could positively identify as the individual I was looking for. However, the only information it provided was the website where those images were hosted. Time to do some more digging. In a few minutes I was able to locate the album on the website which the photos belonged to. The album had a description: “An afternoon at the beach with {name}”! We have a first name!

Now, that may not seem like much, but it was. I was also able to identify some other information from this album such as the name of the beach and the year the photos were taken. A quick google search of the beach put me in… Texas? Huh? Why might our subject be taking professional photos on a beach halfway across the country? The date plays a critical role here because it identified these photos as being 7 years old. Based on my age approximation, this could put them in their early twenties. Why might someone be halfway across the country in their early twenties? College.

I made a second search into google maps looking for any colleges near the beach where these photos were taken. I now had a first name, a better approximate age, and their college. For me, this is enough to start a targeted search on LinkedIn. Using advanced filters, I was able to supply a first name, the field they worked in, education and a location to search. Lo and behold, LinkedIn comes through and I’m staring at the professional profile of our subject. Unfortunately, we weren’t done yet. On a positive note I was able to secure their current employer and work history as well as confirm their college, degree, and major. However, they only supplied a last initial on their profile. I could have stopped here, but I knew I could get a full name if I pressed a little more.

Company directories will often expose full names and are easy to search, when available for small to medium companies. In this case it was a very large corporation so trying to brute force lookup any documentation for a first name I felt would be less than successful. Sometimes you can find old articles containing an employee name from a former employer, however that was unsuccessful as well. Doing a generic search for the first name and the college also did not yield any valuable information. Hmm.

Then I noticed one line of involvement mentioned in the education section of their LinkedIn profile. The school newspaper. Having worked for the school paper myself, I was certain that if I could get a copy of the school newspaper at a time when the subject was on staff, they would be listed as part of the staff. A few minutes later I was able to locate a copy of a newspaper from 2012 that listed our subject’s first and last name in black and white. Using the first and last name, I was able to confirm the subject’s Facebook profile.

Conclusion:

All in all – this took less than 30 minutes to go from a screenshot to a full name, education, and work history. For what? Nothing more than challenging myself. I would venture to say that it is nearly impossible today for anyone to protect their identify. The tools and resources available are vast and not complicated. Anything you transmit over the internet from the videos you film to the text you write, to the ‘private’ information you fill out on a form – privacy and security is merely an illusion.

Paul Sherer

Paul Sherer

https://www.wolfymaster.com

#Entrepreneur, #Developer, #Businessman. Pouring everything I have into everything that I do. Meeting #opportunity at the door.