SockPuppet: SaaS Platform for OSINT Investigations

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

SockPuppet’s SaaS platform for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) investigations securely creates and manages the infrastructure to operate digital personas (aka “sock puppets”) to expose illegal activities such as terrorism, school shootings, and financial fraud.

OSINT collects information from publicly available (i.e. open sources) and is gaining popularity as more such information is available through online sources. 

Digital personas are essential to collect actionable intelligence from social media and chat accounts, including direct interactions with bad actors.

SockPuppet use cases include security investigations, law enforcement research, investigative journalism, and exposing malicious accounts.   

SockPuppet’s secure software container provides a dedicated desktop, virtual phone, and SMS capabilities. It protects personas from discovery by routing traffic from real mobile networks. 

The platform provides the infrastructure to operate “sock puppets” in an easy to consume package, with retail pricing for local law enforcement agencies and internal business investigators.   

SockPuppet uses a persistent virtual desktop solution instead of a browser based solution to avoid having to login and set up a persona’s characteristics each time it’s used, which helps avoid human errors that can expose analysts, sources, and organizations. 

The SockPuppet platform simplifies what is otherwise a considerable manual effort to set up and manage the personas. They plan to release a new portal in January to further simplify persona monitoring and infrastructure management.  

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