Understanding Open Source Intelligence
OSINT is accessing the information which is available in public by applying different search techniques.OSINT is nothing but simply a research which is carried out by specialized website, software solution and creative search query.
In order to carry out crime investigation applying right search approach to gather information available in public is very important such as Facebook profile data, website owner information, IP addresses of users, Additional account of the users, public government record, Hidden website, data available of uploaded photograph or video.
Big Data from the Deep Web is OSINT. Whatever you want to call it – online Big Data, OSINT, or open-source intelligence – your organization can benefit from exploiting that information. There is information publicly available online right now that you are missing by searching with Google, or not searching for at all because you aren’t even aware it exists.
There are different tools available in order to carry out meaningful search, custom search tools : Name search tool, Documents search by format, photo Meta data search, Email assumption search tool. To investigate a photograph alone we have picture search, TinEye, Yankee, Camera Summary (EXIF viewer), image manipulation (identify edited image) few among many other such tools which are freely available on the Internet.
Maltego is an extremely powerful OSINT framework, covering infrastructural exploring and personal scouting.
Shodan is an acronym for Sentient Hyper Optimized Data Access Network. Unlike traditional search engines that crawl the website to display results, attempts to grab data from the ports.
Metagoofil is used to extract metadata from the target. It supports various file types, including pdf, doc, xls and ppt. This open source intelligence tool can also be used to extract MAC addresses.
Google happens to be the most powerful OSINT tool for a user to perform attacks, and forms the basis for Google Hacking Database.
FOCA is a network infrastructure mapping tool that can be used for OSINT. It can analyze metadata from various files, including doc, pdf and ppt files.
Social Engineer Toolkit is an open source tool to perform online social engineering attacks. The tool can be used for various attack scenarios including spear phishing and website attack vectors.
Likewise we can carry out search of Public Record through SSN Death Index to verify death records, Custom phone search tool search for the data associated with phone caller ID test etc. Specialized courses and training are available over the Internet to learn such searching skills.
