Pad & Tablet Forensics

There are rumours that Facebook is working on technology to identify individuals from their photographs.
Recently a photograph was taken at Wembley stadium, this photograph was so detailed and taken at such a high resolution that potentially it allows each and every person in the 80,000 crowd to be identified.

Identification scam
Please identify yourself

Apart from this already being a massive invasion of privacy, and in some cases against existing laws related to photographs of children(be clear that pedophiles will also have access to the picture), it has been kindly requested that if you can identify yourself, you should add a Facebook tag with your details or indeed the details of any other individuals you can identify.

Do you REALLY want Facebook to have a photograph of 80,000 people including yourself each with a clearly identifiable ‘tag’, just be clear that once you have done this you will be identifiable to Facebook, its agents, rival fans, criminals and any law enforcement agencies.
You are also going to be identifiable to the end of time, also you may well be giving up your right ‘NOT’ to be identified in any other images available on the internet.

Reject this invasion of privacy, unite and enter as many false details as you can to ensure the database is contaminated, so that it will be of little use to people trying to identify individuals, or as stated here:
You can “Tag yourself in the crowd and be part of history.” (In ways you could not hope to comprehend)

So I was thinking about Email today, and how to track down those damned spammers.

They consider they are protected, because they sit behind an ‘hidden’ email account, usually one at Google or MSN.

At first it seems like it would not be possible to find out the TCP/IP address of someone you send an email to, especially as the email is a package that is delivered to a mail account and the mail account is read at random.

But consider If we set up a web server, that served uniquely encoded images.

We then send the ‘spammer’ a reply that contains HTML marked up text, and in the HTML we embed an image request, something like:

Now when their email client renders the email on THEIR computer, their computer will make a TCP/IP connection to our image server, once that is done their TCP/IP address will be logged and we can then start to build up a Geo-location map of where they are.
Potentially if we construct our server correctly, as soon as the image is requested we can then launch an exploit against the requesting computer.
This would seem to make rather an interesting ‘plug-in’ for metasploit.