Osint is a collection and analysis of data collected from open-source to produce effective intelligence. NATO defines osint as the derived from publicly accessible information, along with other unclassified information that has slight public distribution. As the name implies, osint is a cybersecurity framework. This tool is mainly used by security researchers and penetration testers for digital footprinting, intelligence gathering, and OSINT research, based on the different topics and goals.
Osint is important because it has very low rigorous processing, exploitation processes, and timeline than more technical intelligence disciplines such as:
1. HUMINT
2. SIGNIT
3. MASINT
4. GEOINT, Etc
Osint encloses a great variety of sources.
(T) – Specifies a link to a tool that should be installed and run locally
(D) – Google dork (aka Google Hacking)
(R) – Requires registration
(M) – specifies a URL that carries the search term and the URL itself must be edited automatically
When we click on the username, domain name, and email address a lot of information will come on the screen in the form of a sub tree. As all the tools are in the single interface makes it super easy to search for the username, email address, domain name, etc. Another interesting category that snatched our attention was “Vulnerabilities,” build within the Domain Names category, which offers access to a lot of quality vulnerability and top CVE databases, such as:
1. Mage Scan
2. Sn1per (T)
3. ASafaWeb
4. Zone-H.org
5. XSSposed.org
There are many categories of tools intended for osint analysis. Open source tools to query multiple search engines simultaneously are part of the OSI ecosystem. These tools exploit the APIs of both free and paywalled open-source and PIA sources. The ecosystem of bespoke OSI gathering, collection and analysis tools includes specialized functions related to the following data types and categories.
Media: Print newspapers, magazines, radio, and television from across and between different countries.
Internet: It outpaces a variety of other sources due to its timeliness and ease of access. This source also outpaces other social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Public government data: public government reports, websites, budgets, hearings, press conferences, telephone directories, and speeches. Although this source comes from an official source, they are publicly accessible and may be used openly and freely by the public.
Professional and academic publications: information gained from journals, conferences, academic papers, symposia, and dissertations.
Commercial data: commercial imagery, financial and industrial valuation, and the databases.
Grey literature: technical reports, preprints, patents, business documents, newsletters, working papers, and unpublished works.
Using the right OSINT tool can help you discover information about your company, employees, IT assets, and other sensitive data that could be exploited by an attacker. Finding the information first and then hiding or separating it could reduce everything from cracking to denial-of-service attacks. Following are examples of the osint tools:
