OSINT - Simple tips #2 - Facebook
Dec 14, 2020 by Alexandre Croix | 2801 views
This second blog post on the OSINT field will talk about Facebook. Again, it is a really simple tip but very interesting.
/!UPDATE 25/02/2021 /!
Unfortunately, this little trick is not working anymore. Facebook seems to have changed something and correct this privacy issue...
Facebook is probably the most known social network in the world. During the third trimester 2020, there were 1.82 billions active users each day!
To create an account on Facebook a simple e-mail address is required. This e-mail address can be publicly shared with friends or with all users! But some users prefer to hide the mail address connected to their Facebook profile. From an OSINT point of view, it is sometimes important to know if a mail address is linked to a Facebook account.
There is, at least, one way to check if a mail address is used for a Facebook account.
Page administration panel
To check the linked account, you have to be a Facebook page administrator. If you are not, you can create a page only for this purpose.
On your page, on the left panel, click on the Settings button
On the Settings menu, click on Pages Roles option
On this new page, you have several options available to manage the different role on your account (administrator, editor, analyst,...).
If you fill the field Assign New Page Role with an email address, Facebook will show you the account linked to this address. The following figure shows an example.
If your OSINT investigation must be without interaction with anyone, pay attention to not click on the name displayed! It will be send a notification (and probably an email) to the user!
Conclusions
A lot of people share information on their Facebook profile. It is sometimes voluntary, but the default Facebook settings share some information with your friends (important to check times-to-times, because it changes often). A few years ago, it was possible to find a lot of pictures, likes,... published on Facebook thanks to Graph Search. Now, it is not possible to use this tool any more so, it is more difficult to collect data from Facebook but still possible!
One basic advice: check your Privacy settings on your account to know what are the informations share with who!
This blog post is licensed under
CC BY-SA 4.0
