Top 10 Popular Open Source Intelligence
Top 10 Popular Open Source Intelligence
Top 10 Popular Open Source Intelligence
Pros are that the internet is free and accessible to everyone unless restricted by
an organization or law. The Internet has all the information readily available for
anyone to access. Cons are that the information is available that can be misused
by someone with a malicious intent. Collection and correlation of information
using these tools are referred to as open source intelligence. Information can be
in various forms like audio, video, image, text, file etc. Below is the bird's eye view
of the data categories available on the internet:
1. Social media websites like Twitter, Facebook etc. hold a lot of user data.
2. Public facing web servers: Websites that hold information about various
users and organizations.
3. Newsletters and articles.
4. Code repositories: Software and code repositories like Codechef, Github
hold a lot of information but we only see what we are searching for.
Getting to know that the information is available is one thing. Collection of the
information is second and making an analysis or intelligence out of them is the
third. The information can be gathered manually as well but that will take the time
that can instead be used in the later stages. Tools can help us gather the data
from hundreds of sites in minutes and thus easing the collection phase. Let us
say that the task is to identify whether a username is present and if so, on which
all social media websites. One way is to log in to all the social media websites (I
bet you don't know all of them!) and then testing the username in that. Another
way is to use an open source tool that is connected to various websites more
than what we can remember and checks the usernames presence on all the
websites at once. This is done just in seconds. Run multiple tools to gather all
target related information that can be correlated and used later.
You may also like: Fundamentals of Website Security for Online Retailers
OSINT Tools
1. Maltego
2. Shodan
Google is the search engine for all but shodan is the search engine for
hackers. Instead of presenting the result like other search engines it will show
the result that will make more sense to a security professional. As a certified
information security professional one of the important entity is digital asset and
network. Shodan provides you a lot of information about the assets that have
been connected to the network. The devices can vary from computers, laptops,
webcams, traffic signals, and various IOT devices. This can help security analysts
to identify the target and test it for various vulnerabilities, default settings or
passwords, available ports, banners, and services etc.
You may also like: Brute Force Attacks: Prominent Tools to Tackle Such
Attacks
3. Google Dorks
Google is one of the most commonly used search engine when it comes to finding
stuff on the internet. For a single search, the results can be of various hundred
pages sorted in order of relevance. The results vary from ads, websites, social
media posts, images etc. Google Dorks can help a user to target the search or
index the results in a better and more efficient way. Let us say that the user wants
to search for the word usernames but only requires the results with PDF files and
not websites. This is done as below:
<Filetype: searches for a particular string in a pdf file>
4. The Harvester
A harvester is an excellent tool for getting email and domain related information.
This one is pre-bundled in Kali and can be very useful in fetching information.
Below is an example of the output when we try to search for emails for Microsoft
in PGP server. You can explore more as per requirement.
5. Metagoofil
Metagoofil is written by Christian Martorella and is a command line tool that is
used to gather metadata of public documents. The tool is pre-bundled in Kali
Linux and has a lot of features searching for the document type on the target,
local download, extraction of metadata and reporting the results. For example:
Users can scan for a particular kind of documents on a particular domain.
Metagoofil –d nmap.org –t pdf.
6. Recon-ng
Recon-ng is a great tool for target information collection. This is also pre-bundled
in Kali. The power of this tool lies in the modular approach. For those who have
used Metasploit will know the power of modular tools. Different modules can be
used on the target to extract information as per need. Just add the domains in
the workspace and use the modules. For starters, here is a sample of the tool
helping you.
You may also like: Top 15 Prominent Wireless Hacking Tools to watch out
for in 2018
7. Check Usernames
Social networking websites hold a lot of information but it will be really boring and
time taking task if you need to check whether a particular username is present on
any social media website. To get such information there is a
website www.checkusernames.com. It will search for the presence of a particular
username on more than 150 websites. The users can check for the presence of
a target on a particular website so as to make the attack more targeted.
8. TinEye
Tineye is used to perform an image related search on the web. It has various
products like tineye alert system, color search API, mobile engine etc. You can
search if an image has been available online and where that image has appeared.
Tineye uses neural networks, machine learning, and pattern recognition to get
the results. It uses image matching, watermark identification, signature matching
and various other parameters to match the image rather than keyword matching.
The website offers API extensions and browser extensions as well. You can
simply visit the image and right click on it to select search on tineye.
Link: https://www.tineye.com
9. Searchcode
Searching for text is easy as compared to searching for a code snippet. Try
searching for a code sample on google and you will be prompted with no results
or irrelevant results. Search code offers you a feature to search for a line of code
which could have been present in various code sharing websites like Github etc.
Users can search for functions or methods, variables, operations, security flaws
and anything that can constitute a code segment. Users can search for strings as
simple as "a++" too complex methods. The search results can be further filtered
basis a particular repository or language. Do consider a few things before you hit
search.
Company X wants to hire some employees for a team that is handling the data
which is sensitive to the organization. Usually, organizations do a background
check for the employees before hiring them. A background check will include
referring to various kinds of information to check the integrity of the information.
An employee might say that he has passed from B University presenting the
certificates as well. How do we ensure that the university is there or not?
Various universities offer search systems online that can be checked for
certificate validation. Police verification for criminal records and searching
various job portals to get the information is also a form of information.
Organisations share candidate feedback on the job portals as well just In case
they have to blacklist someone. Will you be interested in hiring a candidate that
is being blacklisted? Maybe yes, but this needs to be thought twice.
CASE 2: We are being attacked
Organisations that deal with content can refer the Open intelligence to identify
the genuineness of the content.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, the article has tried to cover 2 aspects of OSINT. One is the
technology bit of how OSINT can help. Second is the power of OSINT that can
help us in our day to day tasks. With all that information freely available multiple
actors can accomplish various tasks. A security professional can use the
information for data protection, security testing, incident handling, threat detection
etc. A threat actor, on the other hand, can gain information to perform phishing
attacks, targeted information gathering, DDOS attacks and much more.
Here we have discussed only a few aspects of the OSINT model but there is more
to it like Usernames, Emails, IP addresses, Domains, Media/videos, news,
articles, Social networks, people search, telephone numbers, transport, maps,
archives, metadata, search engines, dark web, digital currency, tools, malicious
content, documentation etc. The list can go on and on, it's just the requirement
that can help in selecting the right tools and techniques. Since this is all free,
users can make their own list as well where they can find information. A few
curated lists of such tools are already available on the internet, thanks to OSINT.
Check them out on Github or other reports. Good luck, Happy hunting!!!
Complementando o conhecimento de ferramentas
1. OSINT Framework
While OSINT Framework isn't a tool to be run on your servers, it's a very
useful way to get valuable information by querying free search engines,
resources, and tools publicly available on the Internet. They are focused
on bringing the best links to valuable sources of OSINT data.
It can be also used to check for brand company names, not only individuals.
3. HaveIbeenPwned
Once you introduce your email address, the results will be displayed,
showing something like:
4. BeenVerified
BeenVerified is another similar tool that is used when you need to search
people on public internet records. It can be pretty useful to get more
valuable information about any person in the world when you are
conducting an IT security investigation and a target is an unknown person.
After done, the results page will be displayed with all the people that match
the person's name, along with their details, geographic location, phone
number, etc. Once found, you can build your own reports.
The amazing thing about BeenVerified it's that it also includes information
about criminal records and official government information as well.
5. Censys
Censys is a wonderful search engine used to get the latest and most
accurate information about any device connected to the internet, it can be
servers or domain names.
You will be able to find full geographic and technical details about 80 and
443 ports running on any server, as well as HTTP/S body content & GET
response of the target website, Chrome TLS Handshake, full SSL
Certificate Chain information, and WHOIS information.
6. BuiltWith
Without any doubt, it is a very good tool to gather all the possible technical
details about any website.
7. Google Dorks
In this case, Google Dorks can be your best friend. They have been there
since 2002 and can help you a lot in your intel reconnaissance.
Google Dorks are simply ways to query Google against certain information
that may be useful for your security investigation.
Filetype: you can use this dork to find any kind of filetypes.
Ext: can help you to find files with specific extensions (eg. .txt, .log,
etc).
Intext: can perform queries helps to search for specific text inside
any page.
Intitle: it will search for any specific words inside the page title.
Inurl: will look out for mentioned words inside the URL of any
website.
8. Maltego
Is an amazing tool to track down footprints of any target you need to match.
This piece of software has been developed by Paterva, and it's part of the
Kali Linux distribution.
One of the best things this software includes is what they call 'transforms'.
Transforms are available for free in some cases, and on others, you will
find commercial versions only. They will help you to run a different kind of
tests and data integration with external applications.
In order to use Maltego you need to open a free account on their website,
after that, you can launch a new machine or run transforms on the target
from an existing one. Once you have chosen your transforms, Maltego app
will start running all the transforms from Maltego servers.
Finally, Maltego will show you the results for the specified target, like IP,
domains, AS numbers, and much more.
If you need to explore more Kali Linux utilities, check out this article: Top
25 Kali Linux Tools
9. Recon-Ng
Recon-ng comes already built in the Kali Linux distribution and is another
great tool used to perform quickly and thoroughly reconnaissance on
remote targets.
Fetching information about any target is pretty easy and can be done within
seconds after installing. It includes interesting modules like
google_site_web and bing_domain_web that can be used to find valuable
information about the target domains.
While some recon-ng modules are pretty passive as they never hit the
target network, others can launch interesting stuff right against the remote
host.
10. theHarvester
This is especially useful when you are in the first steps of a penetration test
against your own local network, or against 3rd party authorized networks.
Same as previous tools, theHarvester is included inside Kali Linux distro.
theHarvester uses many resources to fetch the data like PGP key servers,
Bing, Baidu, Yahoo and Google search engine, and also social networks
like Linkedin, Twitter and Google Plus.
It can also be used to launch active penetration test like DNS brute force
based on dictionary attack, DNS reverse lookups and DNS TLD expansion
using dictionary brute force enumeration.
11. Shodan
It is often called the 'search engine for hackers', as it lets you find and
explore a different kind of devices connected to a network like servers,
routers, webcams, and more.
Shodan is pretty much like Google, but instead of showing you fancy
images and rich content / informative websites, it will show you things that
are more related to the interest of IT security researchers like SSH, FTP,
SNMP, Telnet, RTSP, IMAP and HTTP server banners and public
information. Results will be shown ordered by country, operating system,
network, and ports.
Shodan users are not only able to reach servers, webcams, and routers. It
can be used to scan almost anything that is connected to the internet,
including but not limited to traffic lights systems, home heating systems,
water park control panels, water plants, nuclear power plants, and much
more.
12. Jigsaw
The only drawback is that these queries are launched against Jigsaw
database located at jigsaw.com, so, we depend entirely on what
information they allow us to explore inside their database. You will be able
to find information about big companies, but if you are exploring a not so
famous startup then you may be out of luck.
13. SpiderFoot
SpiderFoot is one of the best reconnaissance tools out there if you want to
automate OSINT and have fast results for reconnaissance, threat
intelligence, and perimeter monitoring.
It was written by our friend Steve Micallef, who did a great job building this
app and writing the SecurityTrails Addon for Splunk
This recon tool can help you to launch queries over 100 public data sources
to gather intelligence on generic names, domain names, email addresses,
and IP addresses.
Using Sipiderfoot is pretty much easy, just specify the target, choose which
modules you want to run, and Spiderfoot will do the hard job for you
collecting all the intel data from the modules.
14. Creepy
You will be able to filter based on exact locations, or even by date. After
that, you can export the results in CSV or KML format.
15. Nmap
Nmap is one of the most popular and widely used security auditing tools,
its name means "Network Mapper". Is a free and open source utility utilized
for security auditing and network exploration across local and remote
hosts.
16. WebShag
WebShag is a great server auditing tool used to scan HTTP and HTTPS
protocols. Same as other tools, it's part of Kali Linux and can help you a lot
in your IT security research & penetration testing.
You will be able to launch a simple scan, or use advanced methods like
through a proxy, or over HTTP authentication.
Written in Python, it can be one of your best allies while auditing systems.
Port Scan
URL scanning
File fuzzing
Website crawling
17. OpenVAS
This is an open source vulnerability scanner & security manager that was
built after the famous Nessus switched from open source to private source.
Then, the original developers of the Nessus vulnerability scanner decided
to fork the original project and create OpenVAS.
While it is a little bit more difficult to setup than the old Nessus, it's quite
effective while working with it to analyze the security of remote hosts.
The main tool included in OpenVAS is OpenVAS Scanner, a highly efficient
agent that executes all the network vulnerability tests over the target
machine.
18. Fierce
Fierce is an IP and DNS recon tool written in PERL, famous for helping IT
sec professionals to find target IPs associated with domain names.
It was written originally by RSnake along with other members of the old
http://ha.ckers.org/. It's used mostly targetting local and remote corporate
networks.
Once you have defined your target network, it will launch several scans
against the selected domains and then it will try to find misconfigured
networks and vulnerable points that can later leak private and valuable
data.
The results will be ready within a few minutes, a little bit more than when
you perform any other scan with similar tools like Nessus, Nikto,
Unicornscan, etc.
19. Unicornscan
Unicornscan is one of the top intel gathering tools for security research. It
has also a built-in correlation engine that aims to be efficient, flexible and
scalable at the same time.
Main features include:
20. Foca
Foca has the ability to analyze and collect valuable data from MS Office
suite, OpenOffice, PDF, as well as Adobe InDesign and SVG and GIF files.
This security tool also works actively with Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo
search engines to collect additional data from those files. Once you have
the full file list, it starts extracting information to attempt to identify more
valuable data from the files.
As you can see, there are a lot of recon and intel gathering tools out there.
On this particular post, we mentioned only 20 of the most popular tools, but
there is much more to discover. Start digging around and testing other
useful infosec tools.
Want to try one of the best intel gathering tools in the market? Start
using SecurityTrails, our intelligent security toolkit built for InfoSec
professionals who need to gather the precise IP, DNS and Domain
information to protect their companies.
Or sign up for a free API access today to integrate your apps with our
intelligent security engine!