New OSINT Source Discovery - Internet Archive Activity

Investigating Internet Archive User Accounts with an Email Address

At least 30 million people have Internet Archive accounts, often used for archiving webpages, media, or other data. If you’re researching someone and know their email address, here’s a clever trick to find out if they have an Internet Archive account and lookup their publicly archived data.

Step-by-Step Guide

1. Access the Right Search Tool

Open the Internet Archive (archive.org), and use the main search function in the center of the page, make sure it is set to “Search metadata”. Enter the email address in the search function and hit “Go”.

2. Search Results

This pulls up seemingly random search results. In my example case, searching the email address found a pdf file of a periodical.

We get this result because the email address indeed is registered to a member account, and that account uploaded this file to the Internet Archive.

3. Identify the User

In order to learn more about the account, we click on the file to pull up it’s page. The page had more information about the file and will list the account member that uploaded it.

So clicking on the file brings up this page:

Scroll down and we see on the right that it lists the account member’s name (blacked out here for their privacy).

If you want to confirm that the email is linked to the account, you can right-click anywhere on the page and when a dropdown menu appears, choose “view page source”. This pulls up a pgae of the code behind the webpage. Here you can do a word search of the email address and it will be found somewhere in this page, listed next to the account name.

Now returning the the previous page where we identified the account username.

Click on the account username and you pull up the account’s details page. See the tabs in the image below. You can see everything that they have uploaded, including every webpage they have archived. You also see when this activity occurred.

If you look at the content and timing is an indicator of what they were doing or working on at that time.

4. Explore the Profile

The user’s profile will display:

• Their username

• Dates of account activity

• Records they’ve archived, providing an interesting look into the timeline of their work and interests.

By tracking archived webpages, you can gain insights into topics the user has researched over time.

This trick is an example of how you can leverage lesser-known search functions to discover valuable, investigator-specific insights from publicly archived information.