Welcome back to my series of setting up Virtual Machined to do OSINT. I’m setting up an OSINT investigation system based on Michael Bazzell’s 7th Edition OSINT book, but I’m using Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu. Remember, this series is about the differences I found between the walkthrough in the book and setting up my environment on a different Distribution.
For the most part, the section on Firefox was already configured correctly in my setup. However, it is better to go through all the steps to make sure everything is right anyway.
The Preferences section matched the expectations presented in the book. It may have been overkill, but I unchecked “autofill address” on the Privacy & Security tab.
Under the about:config section:
- the browser.safebrowsing.phishing.enabled feature was already set to the desired setting.
- the browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled feature was already set to the desired setting.
For Add-ons, the first thing I noted was that the first Add-on in the book didn’t match the Add-on in the walkthrough. The initial list says Firefox Containers, while walkthrough uses Firefox Multi-Account Containers. I also had problems with FireShot.
For uBlock Origin, the first step was straight forward. In the second step of Filters, there are two tabs with the word filter in it. “Filter lists” and “My filters.” Clicking the “Filter lists” tab lists the options that Michael is talking about in the book. After making the changes, click the Apply changes button.
FireShot. The first thing about FireShot is that using the search function doesn’t work. Using the link in the book, typing it into the address bar works for now. However, it doesn’t bring up FireShot. The page is for Full Web Page Screenshots (♥♥♥♥♥) by susbox. As far as I can tell, this is a renamed program for the same Addon. Installing the application will open the web page “hXXp://getfireshot[.]com/installed-lite.php” in a new tab.
User-Agent Switcher. There are a lot of different add-ons with this name. The easiest way to get the one from the book is to use the URL in the book. When I use it, I usually set it to IE on a Windows desktop.
For image searching, my current favorite is Fast Image Research. On the Add-ons Manager page, click the three dots and then preferences. This will open the configuration page. On this page, click the preferences tab and select the options for the sites you like to use for image searches. Click save at the bottom.
That’s it for today. In the next post in this series, we’ll go through setting up Chrome