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The Disinformation Laundromat: An OSINT tool to expose mirror and proxy websites

Content Matching

This capability, still under development, finds matches for content provided in a form accross the internet, flagging known disinformation sites

Domain Fingerprinting

The Disinformation Laundromat - Domain Fingerprinting uses a set of indicators extracted from a webapge to provide evidence about who administers a website and how the website was made.

Tier 1: Conclusive

These indicators detemine with a high level of probability that a collection of sites is owned by the same entity.

Tier 2: Associative

These indicators point towards a reasonable likelihood that a collection of sites is owned by the same entity.

Tier 3: Tertiary

These indicators can be circumstantial correlations and should be substantiated with indicators of higher certainty.

How to use

Included with this tool is a small database of indicators for known sites. For more on creating your own corpus see 'Creating your own corpus' below.

Requirements before installation

Installation

This tool requires Python 3 and PIP to run and can be obtained by downloading this repository or cloning it using git:

git clone https://github.com/pbenzoni/disinfo-laundromat.git

Installing requirements

Once the code is downloaded and you've navigated to the project, install the necessary packages

pip install -r requirements.txt

Choosing a use case

Quick and simple, with a UI

The simpler use case, where you're seeking indicators about about a few URLS, not build up a corpus of data is to simply run the code in the included flask app from the main directory.

python app.py

This should deploy a simple webapp to http://127.0.0.1:8000 or your equivalent location. To make this webapp accessible to external users, I suggest following a tutorial for deploying flask apps like this one: https://pythonbasics.org/deploy-flask-app/

Deeper analysis, analyzing multiple sites against each at once

To analyze many URLs and once and to have a suspect URL run against a those URLS, you'll need to generate an list of indicatorsm, then choose your comparison method.

Generating a new indicator corpus

To generate a new indicator corpus, (a list of indicators assocaited with each site), run the following command:

py crawler.py <input-filename>.csv  <output-filename>.csv

by default, input-filename.csv must contain at least one column of urls with the header 'domain_name' but may contain any number of other columns. Entries in the 'domain_name' column must be formatted as 'https://subdomain.domain.TLD with no trailing slashes. The subdomain field is optional, and each uniques subdomain will be treated as a new site. The TLD may be any widely supported tld, (e.g. .com, .co.uk, .social, etc.)

Comparing to existing indicator corpus

To check matches within the existing corpus (e.g. with {a.com, b.com, and c.com}, comparisons will be conducted between a.com and b.com, b.com and c.com, and a.com and c.com), use the following command:

py match.py

To check a given url against the corpus, run the following command:

py match.py -domain <domain-to-be-searched>

As an API

While a GUI is provided, any function of the Laundromat is also available via an API, as described below:


[GET] /api/metadata

[GET] /api/indicators
Required request fields:
    request.args.get('type', '')

[POST] /api/content
Required request fields:
    request.form.get('titleQuery')
    request.form.get('contentQuery')
    request.form.get('combineOperator')
    request.form.get('language')
    request.form.get('country')
    request.form.getlist('search_engines')

[POST] /api/parse-url
Required request fields:
    request.form['url']
    request.form.getlist('search_engines')
    request.form.get('combineOperator')
    request.form.get('language')
    request.form.get('country')

[POST] /api/content-csv
Required request fields:
    request.files['file']
    request.form.get('email')

[POST] /api/fingerprint-csv
Required request fields:
    request.files['file']
    request.form.get('email')
    request.form.get('internal_only')
    request.form.get('run_urlscan')

[POST] /api/fingerprint-csv
Required request fields:
    request.files['file']
    request.form.get('email')
    request.form.get('internal_only')
    request.form.get('run_urlscan')

[POST] /api/download_csv
Required request fields:
    request.form.get('csv_data', '')

How matches are determined

See matches.csv

Fixes and Features Roadmap

Indicators and Matching

Content Parsing and Comparison

Financial tracking