Wayback Machine comme terrain d’enquête
The Wayback Machine as an investigation ground. Written in French for the magazine’s OSINT special issue.
About the article
In the OSINT special issue of MISC, the leading French-language magazine on information security, I explain how WayTrace works and when to use it: recovering what a site deleted, dating a trace, and linking two identities across web archives.
WayTrace is the open-source tool I built for this work. It reads a domain’s captures in the Wayback Machine, extracts 48 types of information from them, and dates each finding from its first to its last appearance, without sending a single request to the target.
Cite
Housset, T. (2026). Wayback Machine comme terrain d’enquête. MISC, special issue no. 38. Éditions Diamond.
@article{housset2026wayback,
author = {Housset, Thomas},
title = {Wayback Machine comme terrain d'enquête},
journal = {MISC},
number = {HS 38},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Éditions Diamond},
language = {french},
url = {https://connect.ed-diamond.com/misc/mischs-038}
}