18Jan 2018

GEO-LOCATION ON TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM BASED ON OSINT TECHNIQUES: A CASE STUDY.

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We are living in the era of technology and massive information exchange and social networks are very important part as they drastically changed how we communicate. The use of this technology, inevitably leads to disclosure of personal data on the part of users. Making a distinction between the medium itself (social networking platform) and how it is used by users, we set the research question of how possible is a malicious user to retrieve personal data in an automated undetectable way and use them against an unsuspicious person that uses social media. Answering the above question, this paper had intended to detect the possibility of retrieving information in an automated way of two popular social networks, Twitter and Instagram, without the consent or informing the end user - target. The results shown that our activity on social networks, can be exploited by a malicious user using Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques and can collect sensitive personal data (user location via tweets / instas from smartphone). This work showcases user activity (geolocated tweets, instas) on a Google Map and connects this activity in chronological order with vectors, using a travel by map animation. Points of interest are clustered. Showed that users of twitter and instagram cannot fully protected from intruders and misusage of personal information, which unhappily keeps to propagate the personality of the medium. It is worth mentioning that the location activity took place in the two particular social networks, through the targeted user smartphone, reveals the GPS coordinates of the user activity and this was reproduced in a Google Maps type map where we also placed connecting points chronologically. This way a malicious user can track a person?s activity and it is possible to predict future location.

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[K. Tzovelekis, V. Kanakaris and D. V. Bandekas. (2018); GEO-LOCATION ON TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM BASED ON OSINT TECHNIQUES: A CASE STUDY. Int. J. of Adv. Res. 6 (Jan). 780-791] (ISSN 2320-5407). www.journalijar.com

Venetis Kanakaris

DOI:

Article DOI: 10.21474/IJAR01/6283      
DOI URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.21474/IJAR01/6283

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