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One of the most important things that you need to create before performing any social media intelligence

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is to create a Sockpuppet account, and a Sockpuppet account is basically a covert account that you

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can use to gather information about your target.

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And this account should not be related to you at all.

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This is very important because if you used your real profile to gather information from a Facebook account,

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for example, then you might accidentally send a friend request or like a certain post which will reveal

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your own identity.

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So the first thing that you want to do to create a Sockpuppet account is to create a virtual machine.

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And you have already learned what a virtual machine is and how to download and set it up.

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The reason why you want to use a Sockpuppet account in a virtual machine is to prevent websites from

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gathering information about your real operating system, information such as the browser type and version,

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the operating system you are currently using, device information, time zone, and cookies.

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And the second reason is that you might need to create a fake account on shady websites that could have

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malware.

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So a virtual machine will allow you to protect your main operating system from potential threats while

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conducting your Osint investigation.

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And lastly, I like to create a virtual machine for each Osint investigation so I can easily delete

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it once I'm done with the case, ensuring that all traces of my activities are removed and maintaining

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my privacy and security.

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The second thing you want to do is to create an online identity for your covert accounts, which means

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that if you are targeting someone from India, for example, you are trying to gather information about

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this person.

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Then you might to create an account with an Indian name, with an Indian picture, with Indian posts

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for example, etc. so to create an online identity for your covert account, then you can go to a website

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called Fake Name Generator.

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And if you are searching for someone from the United States and you want to create an American profile,

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for example, then you can select the country to be United States.

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And the name set might be, for example, American.

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And then you can select the gender.

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And then I'm going to click on generate.

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And as you can see we were able to generate an American identity with the name Andrea.

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So we don't need all of these information but we might need some of these information.

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For example we don't need the Social Security number or the mother's maiden name, and we don't need

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the phone number because we cannot use this phone number.

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It's only a fake number, but we might use the birthday and age and browser agent, maybe company,

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etc. so if I am creating a covered account on Facebook, then I'm going to create an account with this

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name and with this date of birth.

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Next, you want to add a profile picture to your Facebook or Instagram or X account.

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So to do this you can use a website called this person does not Exist that will generate non-existing

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Faces.

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The only problem that I see when using these faces is that some people know that these are AI generated

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images, but if they try to reverse image search this profile picture, they would not find anything

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on the internet.

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And we will talk about reverse image search in a future lecture.

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And this is another website that will allow you to select a certain face and use it on your covered

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account.

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Another ID that you can use on your Facebook account is by using royalty free pictures.

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So if you go to a website like Pixels or Pixabay, you might search for dog, for example, and you

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want to select a picture that looks not very edited and then use it as your profile picture.

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And this will make people think that this is your dog, for example.

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But the only problem with this method is that if people searched for this image on the internet, then

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they will see that it is a royalty free picture.