Hi, friend. We continue to download the Osinter skill and today we are moving on to social networks. It’s definitely not possible to do without them in the OSINT topic. Social networks are an inexhaustible source of information. After all, the overwhelming number of people actively follow them, post photos, write posts, add friends and like their photos, tag their relatives, in short, do everything to make our work easier. Well, social networks also have a funny feature of periodically losing user data, both registration and personal. All these facts simply oblige us to be able to effectively search for information on social networks; without this skill, our OSINT will never be cool.
In contact with
And today we will work with the social network VKontakte. And although it is losing its popularity every year, due to an absolutely disregard for users, censorship and the desire of the administration to simply squeeze out as much money as possible. Not to mention the fact that employees of all kinds of authorities have free access to everything imaginable, and they don’t even really hide this fact. Which is clearly confirmed by criminal cases for all sorts of absurd reasons, such as storing something, like, illegal, in a closed album, and other nonsense that you all know about without me.
But, despite all these alarm bells that should have buried VKontakte as a phenomenon, a huge number of people still actively use this social network, which means we will also actively use it, only for a slightly different purpose.
In this article we will not set any specific goals for ourselves, simply because they can vary greatly depending on the situation. And we study OSINT as a whole, and not some situational issues. We will simply learn to analyze and collect information, simply study the object. How to apply this information depends on the situation and specific tasks.
How possible friends are selected on VK
The developers of the social network VKontakte keep the list generation algorithm secret. However, attentive users have noticed a clear connection between this list and the following factors:
- Number of mutual friends. This factor is fundamental for identifying possible acquaintances. The more common participants there are, the higher the potential friend’s page will appear on the list.
- Frequency of visits to a possible friend's page. If the account owner has repeatedly viewed a page, it will most likely be on the above list.
- The frequency of visits to your account by a third-party user. If a user often views your page, reposts content, likes and comments on posts, the social network will offer you to add him as a friend.
- Active correspondence. If people correspond, but are not “friends” on VK, their accounts will be mutually added to the lists of possible friends.
REFERENCE! The social network VKontakte does not allow you to see possible friends of other users. So, if a user sees a certain person in their list, it does not mean that they also appear in someone else's list.
So, the list of possible friends is one of the convenient tools offered by the VKontakte network. The list of users is selected taking into account a person’s real and virtual activity and allows you to quickly find the right participant from among mutual friends, thereby expanding your social connections.
We recommend: How to see friends’ birthdays on VK
Accounts
First, a few words about accounts. You need several of them. And there should definitely be no connection between them, different phones, different emails, different content and, of course, when switching between accounts, you need to change the anonymity chains so that they cannot be linked to each other. This may seem like excessive paranoia to some. It’s like we’re not doing anything illegal, we’re just collecting information. But you never know who might be interested in your actions. And if suddenly there is a need to expose your account, for example by writing to someone, then you will have to forget about this account. As well as about the mail attached to it, so about the phone, and if there are other pages on this phone, then you will have to forget about them. Because, in order not to create difficulties for yourself and not to simplify the work of various kinds of unfriendly employees of certain organizations, it is better to register all pages to different phones and emails.
Now OSINT itself. We will train on the hero of one of my past games. A young swindler from Kharkov, Vladika Fedorenko.
Analysis from an OSINT perspective
You should always start by examining the profile itself, because you can already collect primary information from it. We look at where a person lives, the groups in which he is a member - there may be some narrowly focused communities that will give more understanding of the goal. As an example, groups of gyms where the object goes, educational institutions, interest groups. All this will allow you to form a primary picture of the personality. Understand what he breathes, what he is interested in, what kind of person he is. All this information can be very useful to us in the future.
In this article I will not touch on searching by photographs, because there will be a separate material on this topic. Just remember that photos are an excellent source of information about a person and be sure to study them carefully.
Now it’s worth moving directly to analyzing the profile itself and studying the personality. At this stage, we don’t really need the VKontakte page itself. We will use third-party resources that will help us automate some processes and do some of the work for us. It’s worth noting here that the order is not very important and can change depending on the goals being pursued. I will show you a general algorithm from which you can already choose the tools and techniques you need.
How to see possible friends on VK
In order to see possible VK friends, you need to go to the “Friends” section and pay attention to the right side of the screen. It is there that a list of five users is published with whom the page owner may have mutual acquaintances.
IMPORTANT! Each time you enter the “Friends” section, the list is formed in a new way and reflects other users. By clicking the “Show All” button, you can see all users who have any connection with the account owner.
The number of possible VKontakte friends directly depends on the activity of the account. The more a person communicates online, the more often he subscribes to interesting pages and joins groups, the more accounts his page interacts with. Of course, the system also takes into account a person’s social activity in real life. A large number of educational institutions, places of work, recreation, cities of residence increases the list of possible acquaintances.
Reference. There are filters on the page with a complete list of possible VK friends. However, they do not make searching the list itself any easier. For example, if you specify the country “Russia” in the filter, then VKontakte will offer the pages of all users of the social network whose profiles indicate this country.
Resources for OSINT VKontakte
The first resource we will start with is https://220vk.com
There are several useful functions here, from an OSINT point of view:
– On the main page we see when the user was last online and from what device he logged in. Also who he added or removed from friends; – An online tracker will help us find out when a user is online. This is useful to understand what mode a person has, when he is most active. Of course, this knowledge in itself does not provide much. But sometimes it can be useful, especially if we have to somehow interact with him or his contacts. – Outgoing likes – sometimes it’s very useful to know who a person likes. This can give insight into his social circle or people close to him; – Tab “Cities of Friends”. This is probably one of the most useful functions of this resource. It shows from which cities and how many friends a person has. As a rule, this allows us to fairly accurately determine which city our target is from. – Tabs are quite useful for finding friends, especially if a person has closed his page. Of course, it doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a try;
The remaining sections are situational and the need to use them appears extremely rarely. Therefore, I don’t see any point in dwelling on them too much.
https://vk.city4me.com
This resource is very similar to the previous one. But at the same time it harmoniously complements it, and therefore it is worth using both. Among the cool moments: it very clearly and conveniently shows the user’s activity, including what device he came from and how long he was online, and also tracks the activity of friends.
https://vkdia.com
An extremely useful service that analyzes the activity of friends and compares it with the activity of the target itself. Based on the comparison results, it produces hypothetical options with whom our object could communicate. If we monitor the desired page for a longer time, we can quite accurately determine the social circle of the person we are interested in.
Arrangement order
Let's start with a simple one: how are friends located on VKontakte and who is first? If you open the list, you will see that your first friends on VKontakte are those users with whom you communicate most often. Sometimes sorting VKontakte friends can be a little confusing - for example, among your important acquaintances there may be those with whom you have not corresponded for a long time. How so? It's very simple - the communications that influence how people are sorted include not only private messages, as one might think, but also comments on posts, replies, likes, etc. Thus, the first person on the list is not only the one with whom you have the longest correspondence, but also the one whose posts and news are most interesting to you. How to move friends to the top of the display list? Just communicate with them more often, that’s all!
However, there is an exception to this rule - users you added recently are automatically moved to the first 5 VKontakte friends so that you do not lose track of them if they end up at the end of the list. In the future, if you do not communicate with the newly added one too often, he will become one of the first 10 friends on VKontakte, and then the sequence will become standard.
Search for VKontakte pages
https://www.yasiv.com/vk
A very useful service for analyzing friends, searching among friends and finding a circle of connections. Very conveniently visualizes the connections between all friends i.e. shows who is who's friends. Great for finding duplicates and fakes. Connections between different people can be marked in different colors
https://photo-map.ru/
A situational service, but sometimes it can come in handy. Allows you to place a point on the map and search for photos within a certain radius from this point. You can customize specific search parameters.
https://regvk.com/
Well, there’s another situational resource that simply shows the date of registration of the user’s page.
OSINT bots in Telegram
And finally, some useful bots in Telegram. Which also help to search for information on the VKontakte page:
@AvinfoBot – checks the linking of a mobile phone to a page using merged databases;
@GetPhone_bot – checks against merged databases, will find phone, email and other data. Shows which database contains info and general information about the profile. Also knows how to do analytics on top cities and last names of friends
@InfoVkUser_bot – does analytics on the most common cities and universities among friends;
Conclusion
As you can see, the issue of analyzing a VKontakte user page can become a rather labor-intensive task. Especially if he has a bunch of photos on his profile, hundreds of friends and countless other information. As a result, collecting everything together, systematizing and analyzing it can take quite a lot of time. This is why I really don’t like doing this. And, if there is an opportunity to punch a person in some other way, then it is better to use it. At the same time, I always check the contact only for the presence of a phone number and email in the merged databases. Because there were a huge number of leaks from this particular social network, and I proceed to a full analysis of the page only if there is no other choice left.
Well, as another conclusion, although I think it was obvious anyway. Use this social network for its intended purpose, i.e. for maintaining your personal page, it’s definitely not worth it at all. Well, this is if you are at least a little worried about your safety on the Internet and don’t want someone to be able, without really straining themselves, to at least collect a bunch of information about you. And as much as possible to get all your personal data. And if, from the point of view of OSINT, we, as a rule, are looking for some very specific person, in most cases without the goal of harming him, then all the same tools and techniques are also available to people whose intentions are not entirely friendly and, as usually self-serving. And knowing almost everything about a person opens up huge opportunities for social engineering, phishing and other entertaining activities.
Well, we can end on this happy note. Today you received another +1 to Osinter’s skill. You can also read about searching by nickname (HERE), this is no less relevant for searching on social networks. Well, don’t forget to come back to us, because the maximum skill is still very far away.
Your Pulse.
Is it possible to find out who a person is communicating with who is not on your friends list?
You should also separately consider the question of who your friend is writing to, who for some reason is not on the list of your “friends”. The Internet offers various programs and services for reading personal messages, as well as studying the list of people with whom the “object of interest” is in dialogue. Such tools for obtaining the desired information are based on obtaining two types of data for analysis:
- Time of visiting the social network “VKontakte”;
- Likes and comments on the walls of communities and user profiles.
It is worth noting that no application can gain access to the personal data of social network users. From which it follows that it is impossible to obtain the desired information about a user not from the “Friends” list. Since it is enough for such a user not to leave comments or likes anywhere in order to maintain personal secrecy.
So, there is not a single legal way to “declassify” this kind of personality.
