OSINT tips for investigating WordPress sites

There are tens, if not hundreds, of millions of websites that use WordPress for their content management system. People, businesses, schools, major news organizations, and governments run WordPress.

Platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix have begun to eat into WordPress’s web dominance, but it remains a widely used content management system, both for self-hosted sites and those that run on wordpress.com. (More on that distinction in a second.)

It’s important for investigators to know the unique ways you can dig into a WP site, as you’ll likely encounter them on a regular basis. This is particularly true for people that track low quality sites that masquerade as news sources. Such sites often run on WP.

That was the case for a recent investigation by Jonathan Lundberg, a freelance Swedish journalist. He was reporting on a group of Facebook pages that were sharing deceptive AI slop. They’re very similar to hoax pages that I’ve reported on, except the ones Lundberg found were targeting Swedish-speaking audiences. And they consistently shared links to sites that ran on WordPress.

Thanks to a WordPress tip from Karl Emil Nikka, a Swedish IT security specialist, Lundberg was able to find information that helped him identify a person and company that appear to be connected to the operation. 

Here’s how you can use the same tip in your investigations, along with additional OSINT approaches for investigating WordPress sites.