Oblivion-1 ~ A Simple E-mail Tracker

🎯️ Oblivion-Inverse is a simple e-mail tracking solution which based on the usage of web beacons or tracking pixels.

A web beacon (web bug) is a technique used on web pages and emails to unobtrusively (usually invisibly) allow checking that a user has accessed some content. Web beacons are typically used by third parties to monitor the activity of users at a website for the purpose of web analytics or page tagging. They can also be used for email tracking. - Wikipedia

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🤔️ What can I achieve using this?

Basically using this pixel tracking method you can obtain vast amount of information about the targets. But, when it comes to emails there are few restrictions. For an instance, JavaScripts are not generally allowed in email clients.

⚙️ Setup & Usage

Basic Requirements

📥️ Installation

  1. First clone or download this repository as a Zip file to your local machine.

  2. Navigate to the directory. 
     cd Oblivion-Inverse
  3. Create a virtual environment. 
     python3 -m venv ./

  4. Activate virtual environment.

    Linux:

     source bin/activate

    Windows:

     Scripts\activate
  5. Install dependencies. 
     pip install -r requirements.txt
  6. Change the time zone used in routes.py: 
     # Line 23
 generatedOn = str(dt.now().astimezone(pytz.timezone('Use-Your-Time-Zone-Here')))

 # Line 78
 accessedOn = str(dt.now().astimezone(pytz.timezone('Use-Your-Time-Zone-Here')))

    To choose the correct time zone, you can query all the supported time zones like this;

     import pytz
 pytz.all_timezones

After that you can either test the application in your local machine or setup your selected platform as you wish.

🖥️ Testing/Using on your Local Machine | Network

If you have selected the first option then you have to issue following commands;

export FLASK_ENV=development
export DATABASE_URL="sqlite:///data.db"
export SECRET_KEY="replace-this-text-with-a-suitable-key"
python3

import flask
from app import db
from models import db
db.create_all()

Next let’s create a password hash for your user account:

from werkzeug.security import generate_password_hash
userPassword = generate_password_hash('YOUR-PASSWORD', method='sha256')

Then we can add the new user to the database:

from models import Users
user = Users(username="YOUR-USERNAME", password=userPassword)
db.session.add(user)
db.session.commit()

Then hit ‘ctrl + z’ to quit from Python and start your development server:

flask run

Navigate to localhost:5000 in your browser.
If another program is already utilizing port 5000, Address already in use error will be displayed. If that happens you can specify a different port like this:

flask run --port 5001

A login page will be displayed.
Input your newly created username & password and that’s it!

🚀️ Deploying on Heroku Cloud Platform

If you’re willing to use Heroku cloud platform, here’s how to do that: (A Heroku account, Heroku CLI and Git will be needed. Read Basic Requirements)

Change line 20 in tracking_data.html according to your app name.

<code>&lt;img src="https://your-app-name.herokuapp.com/track?utm_id="/></code>

If you have made any changes (such as changing the Timezone in routes.py) to the source code, commit those changes using git add . and git commit -m "commit-message"

  1. Login to Heroku. 
     heroku login
  2. Create a heroku app. 
     heroku create YOUR-APP-NAME
  3. Next deploy the app: 
     git push heroku main

    This will take a while to finish. After deploying we have to add Heroku PostgreSQL add-on:

     heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev
  4. Then we have to create our database and add a new user account on the remote server. But before that we need to setup environment variables on Heroku.
    Add SECRET_KEY as follows; 
    heroku config:set SECRET_KEY=replace-this-text-with-a-suitable-key

    After that issue following commands in the terminal;

     heroku run python3

     import flask
 from app import db
 from models import db
 db.create_all()
    
 from werkzeug.security import generate_password_hash
 userPassword = generate_password_hash('YOUR-PASSWORD', method='sha256')
    
 from models import Users
 user = Users(username="YOUR-USERNAME", password=userPassword)
 db.session.add(user)
 db.session.commit()
    
 quit()

     heroku open

    Alright - Now your app must be online! If every thing went smoothly; a login page will be displayed.
    Input your newly created username & password and that’s it!

  1. Visit the homepage of the app and sign into your account.

  2. First add a suitable title for your message. You can add the subject of the specific email which will make it easier to identified at later times.

  3. Then click ‘Generate’

  4. Then, you can drag & drop the tracking image to the end of your message body. (DO NOT copy & paste the image since it will insert your image as a base64 image to the email body)
    Otherwise, you can manipulate the content of the email body using Developer Tools in browser.

  5. Everything’s done! Now send your email and wait for the results to appear. (you need to refresh your browser to load new entries)

🌐️ How to use a Geo Location API

Using a Geo Location API, you can collect additional information about the recipient such as;

In routes.py line 70 to 75 contains a simple API usage that can be altered according to your opinions. Please note that ipwhois service has certain limitations (like amount of requests) which may eventually cause errors. So, you can choose a better API which fit into your needs.

📌️ Special note about G-Mail

Since Google uses a special technique, “Image Proxies” to deliver images; this pixel based tracking method is not suitable to gather additional information about the recipients who use G-Mail. Instead of recipient’s IP address and User-Agent, you will receive Google Image Proxy’s UA (User-Agent) and IP address which looks like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)

But, on the bright side, you can still get the resource accessed date and time!

📌️ Why not using cookies for tracking?

Yes, you can set cookies for additional/accurate data collection. But they represent as third party cookies within devices. Most of the web browsers/platforms block such cookies by default. [maybe not Chrome :)] So, it’s the death of 3rd party cookies. But you can try!

License & Copyrights

The MIT License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT License

Heroku, GMail, ipwhois, VS Code, Chrome are copyrights and/or trademarks of their respective owners.

Disclaimer

Tracking other users actions across any platform may considered as violation of their privacy. So, kindly use this in a responsible manner.