BinInt

...thoughts and news on digital forensics, pentesting, electronic investigations, and the computer underground.

9/20/2009
Posted by Matt C

Burglary by the Tweets

It's not hard to look around and see that people are posting way too much personal information online. There are tons of articles about it and now we can even find out if you're gay or straight.

Most of the information seems harmless and a lot of people don't care if others know about their personal lives. But how much trouble can it get you in to? One couple thinks their Twitter posts led to their burglary.

Is it that easy?! Let's find out...

Chirpcity.com let's you search tweets by location. I chose a random city from the list and then searched for all tweets mentioning "vacation".


How lucky that the first result includes a potential victim. I don't want to get a real person in trouble here and create a ready-made victim, so I'm blocking out all identifying information. Plus, I don't think this person is actually going to be gone for five weeks during the school year as their Twitter feed also says they're a student. See how quickly we can learn about someone?

Ok, so let's go look at Twitter profile.


Now we're getting somewhere. Our second webpage gave us their last name and website address. If we wanted to learn more we could check out their webpage to hopefully see what kind of stuff they might have we could steal. Now we just need to find out where they live. Cue Zabasearch.com!


This was the most recent entry was for this person. I blacked out all the personal info so it doesn't look like much, but I now have a middle initial and possible address. I guess I could double check with other people searching sites. For a low monthly fee I could even subscribe to a data mining site and have instant information that includes much more than this!

Using free resources and five minutes of my time I located a potential victim and her address. I suppose it would be worth it to spend another 30 minutes and drive by the address to scope it out. Of course, if I really was a criminal I would have found multiple victims to go check out.

I guess it really is that easy. Be careful everybody!

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