you share a lot online

How Instagram oversharing fuels OSINT for scammers and how to protect your identity.

Social Media our everyday drug or more of an alarm clock. Now don’t disagree, I’m pretty sure the first thing most of you do as soon as you wake up is go online and dive into the other side. I’m not saying that’s wrong it’s your right, I myself do it sometimes.

Keeping the whole lecture aside, what we actually don’t notice is the outcome. It has inspired a lot of people worldwide some have become really successful and then there are few who have just lost it.

Let’s take Instagram as an example, it has over 1 billion monthly active users globally. That being said you find a lot of “influencers” and “marketers” basically a go to hub to various resouces & personalities. What you don’t reallynotice is your own personal information open for the world to have a look into. Now don’t get me wrong, everyone is a target each and everyone it’s upto you on how well you protect yourself online.

The First Mistake

“Public” profiles

The most common mistake what people usually do. Profile visibility varies actually, If your a celeb or a very popular “influencer” you might have your very own reasons. But assuming you are just here to explore “other side” just to follow your friends or just swipe through the content on what others are doing now a days, think twice before you make your profile public.

Now the question “what might go wrong”? Ever heard of Catfishing? Anyone can instantly create a fictional persona targeting you specifically within minutes. The catfisher can Intentionally lock you out of your own account and pretend to be you!

The Second Mistake

Exposing your personal identity

Everyone loves travelling and almost everyone posts about their visits to various places. It seems kinda cool and blissful to see them, but everything comes down the moment your start posting the details you never should’ve. What details are we talking about? Your passport, air tickets & your bills.

It’s sad but we don’t have a scarcity of people on the social media posting this information without redacting any PII. With the rightset of filters ( Google Dorks ), you can find tons of posts on social media linked back to this.

Wondering “what might go wrong” again? Each and every identity linked to you reveals a lot of information. If a cell phone number can identify an individual, think for a moment about what an air ticket/boarding pass can do/have.

The Third Mistake

Having a really fancy revealing “BIO”

You will find a ton of them having an over revealing bio, do they do it intentionally? Of course, yes! Let’s do some hands-on recon right here. We will be making use of Google Dorks.

The process is quite simple, instead of getting back tons of results you just want to narrow it down to something specific & sensitive.

Now do a google search for the extact dork as below!

"doctor slapped" site:instagram.com

Confused uh? See all the accounts from instagram having the phrase “doctor slapped” in their bio? But why this you may wonder, look again it says “slapped my a** on 28 Oct” or something similar to this. Yes their DOB revealed!

Guessing the year would be kind of easy, but why am I interested in their DOB? Surprisingly people often use their DOB as passwords, no I’m not joking they really do. A combination of their lastname and DOB e.g. darwin19071997 or other possible combinations.

This time try changing the phrase in the dork to something like “login to earth”.

"login to earth" site:instagram.com

Same results eh? This time with a much fancier BIO i guess.

The Fourth Mistake

Not keeping it to yourself

The word “private” actually has a meaning, but most of them don’t really care. Take a moment swipe through instagram, you will find people actually posting random screenshots. The one’s that are meant to be private are made public intentionally. Have a look at the screenshot below that I found.

An instagrammer actively creating a reel but instead ends up revealing a cell phone number.

See the danger already? It not only puts your information at risk, but the one’s related to you as well.

But I Create Content!!

If you’re really good at something you would probably show it to the outer world right? You may be wondering if there are so many threats in place how would I do it?

Luckily you can have multiple accounts without any restrictions (we never know if there’s going to be any changes made to this)! So having a public “backup” account to feature your content without revealing a lot really helps in this case.

Hope you had a good time reading along and understood how not to reveal everything, so “voluntarily selling off your privacy just for a couple of likes is not really the way to do it”. Stay safe online 😀.