![]() ![]() Yandex, which is akin to a Russian Google, is a goldmine for reverse image searching. The search also limits itself to a single subject so assuming an input of a photo of a house near a lake with mountains you won’t get pictures of houses near a lake with mountains, but just visually similar houses, with no regard for lakes or mountains. ![]() The downside is a lot of the matching focuses on social subjects, so if the subject of your image search isn’t well known you may not get quality results. Between these three sections and the ability to perform additional sizes of identical images, Google is a strong reversing resource. Results are generally split between three sections: A few search results for what the algorithm thinks is in the photo, visually similar (but not identical) results, and pages that include identical images. Google does its best to identify what is the subject of an image and not who. These scores are based on my personal biases and experiences while investigating. Reverse Image Search Capabilities Comparison Table (as of August, 2019)Ī note on the table above: I avoided my usual scale of “Skull and crossbones emoji to star-struck eyes” because I feel like all of these engines have a good amount of merit for each category. It's 2019, here are the results up front so we can all go back to Twitter or Tik-Tok or whatever. The best website to use for reverse image searching: All of them. Emily Hacker Comparing Platforms for Reverse Image Searches While images and photos aren’t the most common piece of information investigators come across in their research, these tactics can still prove to be useful on occasion when you are trying to identify a logo or avatar, geolocate a photo, or identify an individual in a photo. Careful cropping may also yield much better results, as other objects in photos may cause the search engine to focus on the wrong subject. ![]() By flipping the photo and then searching for it, you may be able to find additional results that might not have been returned from searching only one photo. For example, sometimes an image may be posted and claim to be an original, but is actually just a flipped/reversed version of an existing photo. Sometimes when trying to conduct a reverse image search, it can be useful to alter the original image in some way in order to find the best results. In this case, the image I uploaded was unique enough for me to learn that it is an image closely associated with Russian criminal organizations, which helped narrow down that the subject of my investigation might be Russian (or at least have a fascination with Russia).Īt times Google may not return specific enough results in those cases, it can be useful to try reverse image searching with Yandex, Bing, or TinEye as well. I uploaded the avatar and clicked “Search by Image.” Google quickly returns a page that shows the image I uploaded, a possible related search, and a few articles and wikipedia pages related to the image. In this example, I went to and clicked on the camera icon in the search bar.įrom there, you can choose whether or upload an image from your files or paste a URL of an image. The avatar seemed specific, but I was unfamiliar with it and wondered if learning more about the avatar could help me to learn more about the malware author. For example, if you come across a logo that you’re unfamiliar with, a simple reverse image search may return information about the logo’s origin that could be useful to you, such as information about the brand or location.įor example, during the course of an investigation I came across an avatar used by a malware author that I was investigating. By searching on those images in various ways, it can be possible to learn a lot about the subject of your investigation.įor some investigations, it may be enough to reverse image search using a regular search engine like Google or Bing. One type of data that may oftentimes be overlooked is images, such as profile pictures on forum posts, photos in malware advertisements, and more. In security research, we deal a lot with various types of data: IOCs, malware binaries, reports, and more. We won’t be covering any of the more complex aspects of image analysis but instead we’ll be focusing purely on what you can expect when uploading images for reversing. Hopefully you’re familiar with these search engines already but if you aren’t this post is a good crash course for what kind of results you can expect from each.įirst we’ll have Emily give an overview of reverse image searching, and then I’ll break down some comparisons between the most popular image search engines. We’ll look at Google, Yandex, Bing, and TinEye. This time around I’ll be briefly comparing the reverse image search capabilities of some major image search engines. This will be another of a hopefully long series of practical OSINT blog posts from the Security Research team here at DomainTools.
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