Briefing: New tool checks when a website was created

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Craig revealed that more than 40 TikTok accounts racked up over 71 million views by falsely claiming that TikTok pays people to watch videos. He also shared the full investigation methodology: how to find connected accounts, identify affiliate marketing URLs, and determine if a site was built with specific tools.

Alexios spoke to six experts about “digital desecrations,” which are deepfakes that impersonate — and mock — people who met violent deaths. As with so many things, generative AI has exacerbated a preexisting form of abuse.

📍 Disinfo merchants are jumping on geopolitical tensions in the Western hemisphere to push clickbait content. AFP found a group of channels used synthetic versions of real journalists to spread the false claim that the US ambassador to Canada had been recalled; Aos Fatos debunked an alleged dispute between Venezuela’s ambassador and Brazilian president Lula at the United Nations.

📍 New York governor Kathy Hochul is proposing to ban the use of nonconsensual deepfakes in campaign material 90 days ahead of an election.

📍 Google appears to have blocked a handful of AI overviews about health conditions following an investigation by The Guardian.

📍 The US Senate passed the DEFIANCE Act, which allows victims of nonconsensual deepfake nudes to sue the creator of the content for $150,000. This comes on the heels of Grok’s mass undressing event, which continues to have repercussions for xAI outside the United States but not in its home market, where it’s being integrated into the Defense department’s network. Musk claims the whole thing is actually about free speech.

📍 An audit by the South Korean government found that 85 percent of deepfake pornography websites it has banned are still accessible from the country.

📍 The UK’s Press Gazette exposed “more than 50 apparently fake experts who have offered commentary to the British press.” The outlet also published a list of brands that the fake experts “worked” for.

📍 Dr Hany Farid of GetReal Security, one of the leading deepfake researchers, recently demonstrated why you shouldn’t use AI tools to “enhance” images for the purpose of identification. GetReal asked different LLMs to reconstruct the face of a masked person (Farid).

“AI-powered enhancement has a tendency to hallucinate facial details leading to an enhanced image that may be visually clear, but that may also be devoid of reality with respect to biometric identification,” he wrote.

📍 Steven Harris (aka Nixintel) released URL Dater, a free tool that can check the date of when a webpage or website was created. It runs multiple scripts that check domain registration information, certificate transparency logs, and image modification dates to provide useful data. You can test it here but Harris recommends that people grab the code from GitHub and run it for themselves, especially if you’re checking large websites.

📍 My OSINT Training released two new bookmarklets. The Flickr User Profile bookmarklet extracts the “account creation date/time, username, email, social media profiles, and more.” The VK User bookmarklet extracts a user’s maiden name and birthdate and provides access to a larger version of a profile image. Read more here and install them for free here.

📍 RageCheck is a free online tool that “analyzes online content for linguistic patterns commonly associated with manipulative framing—the kind of language designed to provoke emotional reactions rather than inform.”

📍 Benjamin Strick published the latest edition of his Field Notes newsletter. It includes “a simple Google query for pulling satellite-backed location finds … a workflow for auditing PDFs” and more.

📍 Derek Bowler published, “Sentiment analysis for investigators: Mapping emotional data with Python.”

📍 Partner event: OsintifyCON is the first virtual conference fully dedicated to Actionable Open Source Intelligence, designed for investigators, analysts, journalists, and intelligence professionals who work on real cases. Craig will give a workshop on “Social Media Intelligence Techniques with Free Tools: Practical Methods for Modern Investigators.” The conference is on Feb 5 and the training is on the 6. Indicator has partnered with OsintifyCON to offer our readers discounted tickets. Go here to get 30% off an early bird conference ticket, and here to get 30% off the early bird price for a full day of training. The discount ends soon!

📍 OSINT Industries is hosting a free webinar on Jan. 28, “OSINT Investigation: Tracking Fentanyl Precursor Manufacturing in China.” Register here.

📍 Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza are giving a free webinar on Jan. 28, “Exposing and Mitigating Online Mass Manipulation.” Register here.

📍 The Digital Forensic Research Lab published two reports about the Chinese and Russian online response to the capture of Nicolás Maduro:

📍 Graphika researchers Margot Fulde-Hardy and Lili Turner uncovered “a network of 43 domains and 37 subdomains that pushed pro-China messaging while posing as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and other legitimate media outlets.” They connected it to two other China-based influence operations.

Want more studies on digital deception? Paid subscribers get access to our Academic Library with 55 categorized and summarized studies:

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