Caprico

What was your OSINT highlight of 2021?

Tracking Ransomware Actors and Botnet Actors.

What emerging (good or bad) trends did you notice over the past year?

Cryptojacking is still at the forefront of my mind. The volatility (in a positive trend) of cryptocurrency has given attackers a lucrative target to gain some sort of profit without causing major disruptions to affected systems.

I’ve followed cryptojacking botnets for years and with the Log4shell exploit a large amount of the same code-base has been seen exploiting 0-day level vulnerabilities to get as many miner’s installed across the externally available internet facing devices.

This is concerning two-fold as security researchers seem to just pass it off as “oh it’s just a cryptominer”. I’d point to some of the code-bases I’ve found that will overclock a server regardless of if the device will handle the increased load.

Any favorite tool or technique that you tried in 2021?

Selenium powered web scrapers. (TOR browsing specifically)

How do you see the OSINT landscape changing in 2022?

With the rollout of METAverse I can see a large amount of predatory and/or personal data harvesting operations being conducted.

The requirement of having a Facebook account tied to your METAverse account may lead to having that data being linked just by joining a room and seeing other players' data. This also goes beyond just METAverse and extends to other social gathering applications.

This is very concerning as a large portion of social gathering VR communities are young people (minors) that are considerably more malleable to trust anonymous people in VR than in a face-to-face interaction.

Twitter: @C4pr1c0
Blog: https://capricocave.wordpress.com/

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