Welcome back, investigators!

The world is moving fast and it’s hard to keep up with everything happening around us. Not long ago, news from foreign places could take days or weeks to arrive. Now it’s different. Planes, ships, satellites, news and basically everything else is indexed and on the internet. The only problem is there are so many services and this fragmentation can drain your focus fast. But all these things can be integrated into one platform that runs locally.

We want to talk about ShadowBroker today. The developers did a great job making the tool professional, so it does deserve your attention. 

ShadowBroker

ShadowBroker is an OSINT dashboard designed to collect a wide variety of public intelligence feeds into its map interface. It visualizes live information from different sources, which includes aircraft and maritime tracking, satellite orbit data, reports on world conflicts and so much more.

The developers built it using Next.js for the frontend and MapLibre GL for rendering the interactive mapping layer. FastAPI and Python are used for the backend.

Setting Up

Before we start working with the dashboard, we need to set up a couple of things first. The tool does support different OS, but we’ll use Kali. 

ShadowBroker needs Docker and Docker Compose to be installed on the system.

Here are the commands that will help you set things up:

kali > sudo apt update
kali > sudo apt install docker.io
kali > sudo systemctl start docker
kali > sudo systemctl enable docker
kali > sudo apt install docker-compose
kali > sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
kali > newgrp docker

When you run these commands, you might be asked to restart different services. Press “Ok” and wait for the installation to complete. After the installation is complete, restart your Kali.

When your Kali boots, the Docker service should already be running. Now we can install ShadowBroker:

kali > git clone https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker.git
kali > cd Shadowbroker

Once you’re in its directory, you need to run Docker commands with root privileges, otherwise it will throw an error:

kali > sudo su
root > docker compose pull
root > docker compose up -d

It will take a few minutes to install. Time spent on waiting really depends on you hardware and internet speed. It might take roughly 10 minutes. When Docker is done, see if ShadowBroker is up:

root > docker ps

You should see its containers in the output. Your system will keep them running in the background every time you boot.

Dashboard

Now we are ready to test it. Make sure you have allocated enough resources to your Kali VM to let it run smoothly. Open your browser and put this in the search bar: http://localhost:3000 (or try http://127.0.0.1:3000 if it doesn’t open anything).

When you open it for the first time, it will ask you for API keys. These keys are optional and you can skip this part. It will also offer you the option to hook up an AI agent to parse through the data and find correlations, but there is already enough data without it.

On the left side, there is a panel with many Data Layers with information that can be enabled or disabled. They include military flights, private jets, commercial aircraft, maritime vessels, satellite tracking, seismic activity and other global monitoring feeds. The list continues to expand.

It may feel overwhelming at first to work with the dashboard, so there is a legend with icon references. You can find it at the top of the left side, it has a small book icon.

News 

News alerts appear on the lower right side of the interface, categorized by their level of importance.

When significant events occur in a particular region, the platform aggregates related news articles and shows them as yellow clusters on the map. You can open these clusters and see the headlines with links that lead to original sources.

Red clusters contain information collected from Telegram. You can see them scattered across the globe. Quite often they have media attached to them. 

There is also Threat Intercept, these are big banners with alerts that you see on the screen in different regions. You can click and see more detailed information

Military Bases

The recent update brought military bases to the map. Here are some of them near the Strait of Hormuz

Antennas and Nodes

Antennas and Metastatic nodes are also available in the dashboard. You can tune in or send a message.

Satellite Monitoring

Satellites orbiting the Earth have different purposes. Some of them are used for weather forecasting, others give us communication services. There are also some used for recon, military and scientific missions. If you enable the satellite layer, you can see them moving across the planet.

GPS Jamming

GPS jamming can happen for several reasons, including military exercises, electronic warfare operations or just experimental testing.

Here you can see parts of Romania being jammed near the capital.

Aircraft Tracking

The dashboard has several categories of aircraft, including military planes, tracked VIP aircraft and commercial flights.

Some aircraft are tagged with additional information that identifies their owner. The one above belongs to the government of Morocco. You can look up specific individuals in the search bar. For instance, searching for the President of the United States will show the location of his aircraft if he’s flying somewhere. 

Satellite Captures

The satellite captures are updated on a daily basis. They can be useful for environmental monitoring and weather observation.

You can play with different layers under Satellites to see other things. For example, here is VIIRS Nightlight by NASA.

Summary

OSINT is generally about connecting many small pieces of publicly available information into one thing. It’s an arduous thing to do, since you have to jump from tab to tab and find ways to piece it all together. ShadowBroker brings all that aggregated and prioritized information into one platform. The developers have been taking good care of the project for almost half a year now since they published it. New things keep getting integrated, expanding the amount of data available for analysis. Given how simple it is to set up, it’s worth giving it a shot.

If you want to improve your OSINT skills, consider our OSINT training. Those who need assistance in finding the truth, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at hackers-arise@protonmail.com. We will conduct an investigation for you.

The post Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): Tracking World Events with ShadowBroker first appeared on Hackers Arise.