Adrian Korn
October 20, 2020
Last week, as our team was busy planning our first ever conINT conference with The National Child Protection Task Force and The Many Hats Club, we also quietly launched our new and improved Trace Labs website!
This was something in the works for many months, as we believed the Trace Labs of 2018 is very different from the Trace Labs of today as our community and mission have evolved exponentially. We wanted our brand to reflect this increased growth, and to also reflect the community we've built over the past few years. This is why we brought in Sean Sun, our new Creative Director earlier this year. Sean was someone who had been active in the Trace Labs community for a while, contributing designs and OSINT efforts. Now, not only did Sean bring his own creative expertise to our team, but he also brought with him the expertise of his creative studio "Miscreants" to support the efforts of our brand rebuild.
Miscreants is a creative studio rooted in the cybersecurity community. They focus on helping organizations in the infosec space connect with their audience so we found them to be the perfect fit to elevate our brand.
We started working with Miscreants back in June of this year to begin our brand refresh. What was the first thing we looked at? Our flagship event of course! We wanted to make our CTF relatable to the average person where it would be less intimidating for someone who has never done OSINT before to join in and help do #OSINTForGood. When we landed on the name “Search Party CTF”, we knew we struck gold and made the decision to rebrand the formerly known “Missing Persons CTF”. We’ve found that, when people hear the new name, they instantly get it.
At its most basic level, a search party is a group of people who look for lost or missing persons.
The whole premise of Trace Labs was built on pairing OSINT with CTFs with real life search parties, so it was a no brainer to go back to the grassroots and brand our CTF as the "Search Party CTF".
This was the first step in creating a new identity for Trace Labs. The next step was to better communicate our mission to our community and to law enforcement and prospective partner organizations around the world. The reality was, our leadership team who put together our first iteration of our website did so from a "tech" point of view, and we needed to change the perspective and make our content more easily digestible by those with non tech backgrounds! So we spent countless hours discussing our goals for a new website with the Miscreants crew, and agreed upon new brand guidelines and a new brand identity with a greater focus on sharing OSINT content back to the community. And in time, this new website was born!
Sharing more OSINT content with the community meant we needed to focus on bringing in the industry’s brightest minds to share their knowledge through blogs and video demos. We started with introducing more OSINT videos to our YouTube channel, such as the ones below.
Starting today, we are taking this one step further, with the start of regular sharing of OSINT blogs curated from talented members of the Trace Labs community!
Our first featured blog for this new initiative is “Thinking outside the box – Data Breaches” written by Eva Prokofiev which you can check out here.
We are truly excited to start on this journey of providing more value back to the OSINT community that has supported us over the past few years. Stay tuned for more announcements on these new content sharing initiatives and opportunities!
