The Hackers Hunting Down Missing People
“100 points for email address,” one of the judges for the competition types into Slack. “3 x 200 points for those pictures. 600 total,” they continue.
Attendees of the annual DEF CON security conference are competing in the event’s first open source intelligence—or OSINT—capture the flag (CTF) run by non-profit TraceLabs; a challenge to hunt down public albeit potentially hard-to-find information on particular targets. But unlike other capture the flag events, this isn’t a game.
Instead, the targets are real missing people. The information the hackers are gathering is authentic, and the intention is to provide it to the authorities to help track down the subjects. At a previous event in Toronto, participants successfully found the location of two people, Robert Sell, the founder of TraceLabs, told Motherboard at DEF CON last week.
