Tracking Internal Edits: Deconstructing Bellingcat’s "113. Anonymous Edits"
Bu çözümün Türkçesi de var: sağ üstten dili TR yapın.
In this write-up, we tackle Bellingcat’s Open Source Intelligence challenge titled 113. Anonymous Edits. The challenge asks us to uncover the title of a Portuguese Wikipedia page belonging to someone working for the President of Portugal in 2016, which was edited from inside the Presidency’s own network more than any other article.
The challenge prompt provides an immediate clue: “Wikipedia leaves a RIPE trail...”
Phase 1: Identifying the Target Institution
We started by identifying the political landscape of Portugal in 2016. A basic query confirms that Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa took office as President of Portugal in 2016, operating out of the official presidential residence, the Palácio de Belém (Presidência da República)
Phase 2: RIPE Database Query and Network Reconnaissance
Following the prompt’s reference to RIPE, we navigated to the official RIPE Database query portal (apps.db.ripe.net). Querying for institutional contacts linked to Presidência da República exposed the contact role and registered entity details
From the contact record, we retrieved the primary organization identifier: ORG-PDRD1-RIPE (Secretaria Geral da Presidencia da Republica).
To extract the exact public IP ranges allocated to this body, we executed an inverse lookup filtering specifically by the org attribute for ORG-PDRD1-RIPE. This search revealed the official network assignment:
- inetnum:
192.162.17.0 - 192.162.17.255 - CIDR Notation:
192.162.17.0/24 - netname:
PRESIDENCIA-DA-REPUBLICA-DA-PORTUGESE
Phase 3: Auditing Wikipedia Edits via CIDR Range
When anonymous edits are committed to Wikipedia, the MediaWiki engine publicly logs the editor’s IP address instead of a username.
We accessed the Portuguese Wikipedia contribution query interface (pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Especial:Contribuições) and entered the full subnet: 192.162.17.0/24.
Examining the historical revisions originating from IP 192.162.17.254 revealed several modifications to Portuguese cultural and political topics across different years. The only article edited from this subnet during the target year of 2016 occurred on August 17, 2016, modifying the article for Portuguese writer and presidential consultant Pedro Mexia.
Conclusion: Final Answer
The Wikipedia article frequently edited from inside the Portuguese Presidency’s internal network in 2016 is:
Pedro Mexia
Originally published on Substack