Top 10 Popular Open Source Intelligence.docx

Top 10 Popular Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Tools Introduction In this article, we will be discussing various OSINT tools that are available in the market. When we search the internet there are multiple pages of results that are presented. We just have a look at the first page and research and if we do not get what we are expecting, we stop right? But have you ever wondered what lies in those hundreds of pages of result? "Information”! Let's get this free information using various tools. Tools are important but not knowing the usage of a tool will leave the user helpless. Before digging into the tools let's have a fair idea of what OSINT is and what can be achieved out of it.

What is Open Source Intelligence? OSINT stands for open source intelligence. The Internet is an ocean of data which is an advantage as well as a disadvantage. 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.

Why do we need tools? 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

Maltego is developed by Paterva and is used by security professionals and forensic investigators for collecting and analyzing open source intelligence. It can easily collect Information from various sources and use various transforms to generate graphical results. The transforms are inbuilt and can also be customized based on the requirement. Maltego is written in Java and comes pre-packaged in Kali Linux. To use Maltego, user registration is required, the registration is free. Once registered users can use this tool to create the digital footprint of the target on the internet. 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:

Some of the other indexing options are:    

Inurl: search for a string in URL of the page. Intitle: To search the title for a keyword. Ext: To search for a particular extension. Intext: Search for a particular text in a page.

Sometimes it is also referred to as Google hacking. 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. E.g the harvester –d Microsoft.com –b pgp

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. A more advanced version of the website is https://knowem.com which has a more wide database of more than 500 websites along with a few more services? 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. 10. Recorded Future

Recorded Future is an AI-based solution to trend prediction and big data analysis. It uses various AI algorithms and both structured and unstructured data to predict the future. The users can get past trends and future trends basis OSINT data.

The utility of tools within the organization Using the information that is freely available is an important task for the organization (maybe not for all but mostly). Let's take a few examples where these tools and manual means come to our rescue and generate something that makes sense to the organization. Another interesting read: Penetration Testing: Step-by-Step Guide, Stages, Methods and Application CASE 1: Hiring an employee 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 Cybersecurity is booming because of increasing cyber threats. Let's consider a scenario where an organization is getting large traffic from unexpected countries. This raises a concern that this is a DOS attack. Referring to various databases that are freely available on the internet can help you to get a clear idea of the incident. Is the IP blacklisted? Is this traffic expected? Various details about the source can be gathered from the internet using OSINT techniques. A lot of free network-based tools are available on the internet that has been connected to various databases for this kind of information. CASE 3: We are the ORIGINALS Organisations that deal with content can refer the Open intelligence to identify the genuineness of the content.    

Universities can check for copied submissions of assignments and projects. Industries can check for copied codes. Track usage of copyright images and content. Identify plagiarised articles and literature.

Explore OWASP- Top 10 Vulnerabilities in web applications (updated for 2018)

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

20 Recon and Intel Gathering Tools used by InfoSec Professionals Important note before we start: remember that you should never use these tools on external networks/systems without previous authorization. These tools are presented here in order to help IT security researchers and private/public infosec investigators during the first phase of information gathering, which is one of the most important parts of a cybersecurity investigation.

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. While this web application was originally created focused on IT security, with the time it has evolved and today you can get other kinds of information from other industries as well. Most of the websites it uses to query the information are free, but some may require paying a low fee.

2. CheckUserNames CheckUserNames is an online tool that can help you to find usernames across over 170 social networks. This is especially useful if you are running an investigation to determine the usage of the same username on different social networks. It can be also used to check for brand company names, not only individuals.

3. HaveIbeenPwned HaveIbeenPwned can help you to check if your account has been compromised in the past. This site was developed by Troy Hunt, one of the most respected IT security professionals of this market, and it's been serving accurate reports since years.

If you suspect your account has been compromised, or want to verify for 3rd party compromises on external accounts, this is the perfect tool. It can track down web compromise from many sources like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo accounts, as well as LastFM, Kickstarter, Wordpress.com, Linkedin and many other popular websites. 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. BeenVerified background reports may include information from multiple databases, bankruptcy records, career history, social media profiles and even online photos.

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 BuiltWith is a cool way to detect which technologies are used at any website on the internet. It includes full detailed information about CMS used like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc, as well as full depth Javascript and CSS libraries like jquery, bootstrap/foundation, external fonts, web server type (Nginx, Apache, IIS, etc), SSL provider as well as web hosting provider used.

BuiltWith also lets you find which are the most popular technologies running right now, or which ones are becoming trending. Without any doubt, it is a very good tool to gather all the possible technical details about any website.

7. Google Dorks While investigating people or companies, a lot of IT security newbies forget the importance of using traditional search engines for recon and intel gathering. 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. Search engines index a lot of information about almost anything on the internet, including individual, companies, and their data. Some popular operators used to perform Google Dorking:     

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.

Log files aren't supposed to be indexed by search engines, however, they do, and you can get valuable information from these Google Dorks, as you see below:

Now let's focus on other more practical tools used by the most respected InfoSec professionals:

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. Using Maltego will allow you to launch reconnaissance testes against specific targets. 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. This web reconnaissance framework was written in Python and includes many modules, convenience functions and interactive help to guide you on how to use it properly. The simple command-based interface allows you to run common operations like interacting with a database, run web requests, manage API keys or standardizing output content. 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 theHarvester is another great alternative to fetch valuable information about any subdomain names, virtual hosts, open ports and email address of any company/website. 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 Shodan is a network security monitor and search engine focused on the deep web & the internet of things. It was created by John Matherly in 2009 to keep track of publicly accessible computers inside any network. 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 Jigsaw is used to gather information about any company employees. This tool works perfectly for companies like Google, Linkedin, or Microsoft, where we can just pick up one of their domain names (like google.com), and then gather all their employee's emails on the different company departments. 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 Creepy is a geo-location OSINT tool for infosec professionals. It offers the ability to get full geolocation data from any individuals by querying social networking platforms like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc. If anyone uploads an image to any of these social networks with geolocation feature activated, then you will be able to see a full active mal where this person has been. 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. Some of the main features include:



   

Host detection: Nmap has the ability to identify hosts inside any network that have certain ports open, or that can send a response to ICMP and TCP packets. IP and DNS information detection: including device type, Mac addresses and even reverse DNS names. Port detection: Nmap can detect any port open on the target network, and let you know the possible running services on it. OS detection: get full OS version detection and hardware specifications of any host connected. Version detection: Nmap is also able to get application name and version number.

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. Main features include:    

Port Scan URL scanning File fuzzing Website crawling

In order to avoid getting blocked by remote server security systems, it uses an intelligent IDS evasion system by launching random requests per HTTP proxy server, so you can keep auditing the server without being banned.

17. OpenVAS OpenVAS (Open Vulnerability Assessment System) is a security framework that includes particular services and tools for infosec professionals. 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. On the other hand, another main component is called OpenVAS Manager, which is basically vulnerability management solution that allows you to store scanned data into an SQLite database, so then you can search, filter and order the scan results in a fancy and easy way.

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:       

Full TCP/IP device/network scan. Asynchronous stateless TCP scanning (including all TCP Flags variations). Asynchronous TCP banner detection. UDP Protocol scanning. A/P OS identification. Application and component detection. Support for SQL Relational Output

20. Foca FOCA (Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives) is a tool written by ElevenPaths that can be used to scan, analyze, extract and classify information from remote web servers and their hidden information. 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!