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Track Criminals with Word Docs? Shocking Law Enforcement Hack #shorts

BSides Frankfurt1:24668 viewsPublished 2026-03Watch on YouTube ↗
About this talk
A chilling case where a 12-year-old girl was abducted. Investigators tricked the suspect into opening a Word document, revealing his IP address and leading to his capture. #CyberSecurity #DigitalForensics #TrueCrime #LawEnforcement #TechInLaw
Show transcript [en]

But this is one week at our company in 2019. Like I said, it looks different in Elastic. Now, the next one is Word Docs. And I'm going to do a demonstration of how you can couple this with a share because I think it's hilarious. Uh, but you can create Word documents that beacon back. The first time I ever did this, I was working with the United States Law Enforcement Agency. They were working a case where a 12-year-old girl had been abducted. We knew who had the 12-year-old little girl because he changed his Skype picture to be a picture of the little girl crying. So, working with this law enforcement agency, they came to me and they said,

"Is there any way we can work to find where this individual is?" If you remember in the old days with Skype, if you went to Skype with a warrant, they would basically tell you, "No, we're not going to give you IP address and location information for any of our customers ever." So, what we did is another family member that was communicating with him via Skype was working with us. We created a word document. We sent the word document to the suspect and the name of the word document was something like news clippings because his friend said, "Hey, you know, there's a warn out for your arrest. Here's some news clippings." He opened up the word document and we got

the IP address, the date, time stamp and the source