Ruin Life Tactics - Data Mining 01

Ruin Life Tactics
Data Mining Lesson 01: Online Identities

Introduction
The following sections in will cover techniques necessary for the retrieval of data needed to discover the identity, location, relationships and other information relevant to your targeted victim. You will need a web browser, several disposable email accounts, some understanding of how search engines operate, and a lot of patience. These are not necessarily the order in which you will find this information and as such you should consider these steps to be non-linear.

Online Identities
It is quite likely that you'll have at least an email address, a screen-name or a forum user-name of your target and this is a good place to start. Before you do any searching, you'll want to examine this to see if you can learn any information from just the identity. Be intuitive- sometimes this could contain part or all of their real name, a phone number or area code, ZIP code, DOB, or even their house number. It's also likely that it'll be something unoriginal such as SweetPrincess69.

Your first step is to do a quick Google search. If you're working with an email address try omitting the '@*.com' or try chopping it into chunks to see if this turns up anything useful. You may simply be led straight back to the source where it came from, but this is fine. Read through as much information on the target as you can at the source of the identities you have and save everything to .txt files. Try to access the sites where your victim resides as little as necessary- constant searches for the same user can make admins curious.

Once you've gathered what intel you can it's time to grab your disposable email and start signing up to social networking sites. Use these as platforms for searching with the email addresses you have, or try to guess the email if you've only got a screen/user-name. This can be tedious, but you should come up with a few hits. Always remember to grab the URL that you've discovered and the ID specific to the site in question. (This ID is generally a number, i.e. Facebook profile_id=#########).

The user-names are generally relevant, but the ID is generally a unique number or string that will greatly assist you in narrowing the scope of your search. Often you'll dig up an older post that's been cached by Google before the target hardened their privacy settings. Facebook and others can be a pain when viewing Google's cache, so be ready to hit the ESC key almost as soon as the page loads. You'll see what I mean.

With some luck you'll have either a name, a list of friends, general likes/dislikes, workplace, hometown, and other small points of data that are too numerous to list. As you record this information be sure to build a profile or dossier of sorts for your target. Think of it as a 'personality prediction' cheat sheet. As you come across data that you are unsure about use this to assess it.

You'll soon discover a pattern, especially related to the way they socialize with others. Humans are fairly predictable creatures, leaving tell-tale signs along the way. You'll see consistent spelling and grammar errors, limited vocabulary, over-use of certain words, and other linguistic idiosyncrasies. This early bit of footwork takes time and requires a bit of intuition though you'll soon find yourself in the mind of your target. This will allow you to easily predict the target's movements as your research draws you closer.