In the newest episode of Show & Tell, Kolina Koltai, a senior researcher and trainer at Bellingcat, walked us through how she exposed the infrastructure and operators behind AI nudifier websites, a widespread tool of image-based sexual abuse that we have also covered extensively on Indicator.
Kolina has a PhD from the University of Texas's School of Information and previously worked at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington as well as the company formerly known as Twitter.
You can watch the episode above or on our YouTube channel. We're also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Kolina showed us how she uses tools like DNSlytics, DomainTools, and OpenCorporates to connect nefarious websites together and reveal their ultimate owner(s). In one example, she unmasked the man behind two deepfake porn sites:
We also discussed how Kolina followed the money trail to reveal that a network of AI nudifiers used gaming platforms to process payments:
And we talked about how to organize leads within investigations, how to find information in the HTML files of sites saved on the Internet Archive, and the fact that not all Canadians are nice (who knew!).
About Show & Tell
Show & Tell is Indicator's monthly podcast! It’s hosted by us: Alexios Mantzarlis and Craig Silverman. Our producer is Nasha Dutta.
We talk about digital investigations with leading journalists, OSINT investigators, threat analysts, and trust and safety researchers. We aim to be as practical as possible by having our guests walk us through one or more investigations or analyses they worked on.
Our previous episodes featured Clara Jiménez Cruz, CEO of the nonprofit Spanish fact-checking and digital investigative outlet Maldita; and Jeff Horwitz, an investigative reporter for Reuters who has focused on the scam economy on Meta’s platforms.
We hope you enjoy and learn from the conversation with Kolina. Catch every episode by subscribing to our YouTube channel. We're also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Have a suggestion for who we should feature next? Email us.
