OSINT tool “Illicit Services” has been shut down by its creator and owner Miyako Yakota due to growing concerns on the website being used as “a port of illegitimate business and crime rather than an effective Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) tool”.
While the tool has “dramatically” improved life for some people, it has been “possibly detrimental” to others, after it became popular in the doxxing and sim-swapping community, the tool’s developer said in an announcement on Telegram channel illsvcchat.
One “golden rule”of the service was that data needs to be publicly available before it can be indexed. Therefore, the database contained publicly available breached databases, offering data such as first and last names, addresses, vehicle identification numbers, license plates, passwords and emails.
The service started becoming more and more popular and reached over 14 billion records in its database.
The site started as a joke, according to the Telegram channel, and there was a plan in place to get away from the shady naming of “Illicit Services”, as the owner moved the website to a new domain in June because of issues with its registrar.
Just a day before the closure announcement, the owner of the Telegram channel uploaded the code for the search app on Github.
Whoever has “a significant amount of unused credits left” can send a PM with their wallet ID to be refunded, the owner wrote in the announcement. “All access logs will be deleted after sending this message. I never have had any interest in what you searched for, it will not be sold, no matter who asks,” Miyako Yakota said, adding that the original data sets and converted data will be kept in cold storage and inaccessible to the public.
“I will move on to other big data projects, I have plans, but no promises,” Yakota added.
Main image source: https://web.archive.org
