One of the most important things that you need to create before performing any social media intelligence
is to create a Sockpuppet account, and a Sockpuppet account is basically a covert account that you
can use to gather information about your target.
And this account should not be related to you at all.
This is very important because if you used your real profile to gather information from a Facebook account,
for example, then you might accidentally send a friend request or like a certain post which will reveal
your own identity.
So the first thing that you want to do to create a Sockpuppet account is to create a virtual machine.
And you have already learned what a virtual machine is and how to download and set it up.
The reason why you want to use a Sockpuppet account in a virtual machine is to prevent websites from
gathering information about your real operating system, information such as the browser type and version,
the operating system you are currently using, device information, time zone, and cookies.
And the second reason is that you might need to create a fake account on shady websites that could have
malware.
So a virtual machine will allow you to protect your main operating system from potential threats while
conducting your Osint investigation.
And lastly, I like to create a virtual machine for each Osint investigation so I can easily delete
it once I'm done with the case, ensuring that all traces of my activities are removed and maintaining
my privacy and security.
The second thing you want to do is to create an online identity for your covert accounts, which means
that if you are targeting someone from India, for example, you are trying to gather information about
this person.
Then you might to create an account with an Indian name, with an Indian picture, with Indian posts
for example, etc. so to create an online identity for your covert account, then you can go to a website
called Fake Name Generator.
And if you are searching for someone from the United States and you want to create an American profile,
for example, then you can select the country to be United States.
And the name set might be, for example, American.
And then you can select the gender.
And then I'm going to click on generate.
And as you can see we were able to generate an American identity with the name Andrea.
So we don't need all of these information but we might need some of these information.
For example we don't need the Social Security number or the mother's maiden name, and we don't need
the phone number because we cannot use this phone number.
It's only a fake number, but we might use the birthday and age and browser agent, maybe company,
etc. so if I am creating a covered account on Facebook, then I'm going to create an account with this
name and with this date of birth.
Next, you want to add a profile picture to your Facebook or Instagram or X account.
So to do this you can use a website called this person does not Exist that will generate non-existing
Faces.
The only problem that I see when using these faces is that some people know that these are AI generated
images, but if they try to reverse image search this profile picture, they would not find anything
on the internet.
And we will talk about reverse image search in a future lecture.
And this is another website that will allow you to select a certain face and use it on your covered
account.
Another ID that you can use on your Facebook account is by using royalty free pictures.
So if you go to a website like Pixels or Pixabay, you might search for dog, for example, and you
want to select a picture that looks not very edited and then use it as your profile picture.
And this will make people think that this is your dog, for example.
But the only problem with this method is that if people searched for this image on the internet, then
they will see that it is a royalty free picture.