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<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\nBut that\u2019s not all we\u2019ve been doing! Because the 26th March means another Tracelabs CTF party and another outing for Team Vertical Interference!! Tada!<\/p>\n\n\n\n This time The Beautiful One and I were joined by two others. The Infosec Phoenix is someone that I hugely respect and has recently started a new role in OSINT full time, which is amazing. A few months back in November I did an OSINT challenge to raise money towards Infostep 2021<\/a>, where I would pledge a donation on their winner of the challenge\u2019s behalf if they could locate exactly where I was. The OSINT work done was really good – you can find a writeup she did here!<\/a> The other person joining us was Darren who was giving this a go for the first time. A VPN is important to hide your location. For the Trace Labs missing persons CTF it’s a really good idea that your location can’t be traced. You don’t know who you might annoy by finding someone you’re preventing from being trafficked. Two good ones are Mullvad & Proton VPN.<\/p><\/li>\n\n\n\n Create sock accounts. Although the Trace Labs CTF is “no touch”. That is you can’t force password resets or interact directly with people to find information, creating a sock is a good idea so that you don’t taint your own social media accounts later. “People you may know” suggestions work by assessing who you interact with so if your picture starts appearing among friends then it’s a bit of a giveaway.<\/p><\/li>\n\n\n\n On off is a great app to give a spoof mobile phone number to use for sock accounts when creating. This means you don’t need to use a personal phone number and have it traced back to you easily. Be aware there are methods of knowing who you are though.<\/p><\/li>\n\n\n\n Download the Trace Labs VM. There are loads of really good tools to help with your investigation <\/p><\/li>\n\n\n\n Do all your investigations off a clone VM and destroy after the investigation. That way you can’t go back to it later. Some of the things you might see are harrowing and by destroying it allows you to let go. <\/p><\/li>\n\n\n\n Prepare mentally. The subjects in the Trace Labs CTF are real missing people. The work you do is trying to find real missing people, and those people include children. They include people that you might find have endured horrific things that they’ve escaped, or may have been kidnapped and are currently enduring horrific things.<\/p><\/li>\n\n\n\n As always, I highly rate the talk from Nicole Beckwith on mental health preparation before anyone does any OSINT to prepare you too. New Year, New House, New Tracelabs OSINT Party<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147072314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[129,132],"tags":[38,133,37,34,35,36],"class_list":["post-141544418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","category-home-improvement","tag-ctf","tag-home-improvements","tag-missing-persons","tag-osint","tag-osint4good","tag-tracelabs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141544418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141544418"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141544418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147072320,"href":"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141544418\/revisions\/147072320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147072314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141544418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141544418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141544418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/danconn.dev\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Screenshot-2024-02-10-at-04.53.51-1024x541.png\")
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As a team we had only formed on the 24th March so two days before the event. Vertical Interference itself (Just The Beautiful One and I) had only had one outing a few months ago for the ConINT Tracelabs Search Party<\/a>. I shared some advice as a prep checklist which others may find useful, if they ever want to do it:
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