The first phase of a targeted attack, also known as a penetration test or red team action, is acquiring intelligence about the target. While there are ways and means to accomplish this secretly, most intelligence collecting begins with scraping material from public sources, which is referred to as open-source intelligence or OSINT. Because of social media and the popularity of online activities, there is such a plethora of legally collectable OSINT available now that it may be all that is necessary to provide an attacker with all they need to properly profile an organization or individual.
In this article, we’ll explain what OSINT is and how you can learn to utilize OSINT technologies to better understand your digital footprint.
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What is OSINT – Open Source Intelligence?
If you’ve heard the term but aren’t sure what it means, OSINT stands for open source intelligence, and it refers to any information on an individual or organization that may lawfully be obtained from free, public sources. In fact, this usually refers to material discovered on the internet, but practically any public information, whether books or reports in a public library, articles in a newspaper, or remarks in a press release, comes under the category of OSINT.
OSINT also covers information that may be discovered through other forms of media. Though we often think of it as text-based, it also includes information in photos, videos, webinars, public speeches, and conferences.
What is the purpose of OSINT?
An attacker – or friendly penetration tester – might profile a potential victim by obtaining publicly accessible information about it in order to better understand its features and reduce the search area for potential vulnerabilities. Without actively engaging the target, the attacker might utilize the intelligence gathered to create a threat model and devise an attack strategy. Like military strikes, targeted cyber attacks begin with reconnaissance, and the initial stage of digital reconnaissance is passively obtaining data without alerting the target.
Gathering OSINT about yourself or your company is also an excellent approach to learn what information you are providing potential attackers. Once you understand what type of information may be obtained about you from public sources, you can utilize it to assist you or your security team create stronger defensive methods. What flaws does your general information expose? What can an attacker learn to use in a social engineering or phishing attack?
What is the process of open-source intelligence (OSINT)?
OSINT is achieved by integrating video, image, audio, and text data from public domain data sources and analyzing the data to get information from all sources of data. The analysis is based on machine learning and deep neural network techniques, which allow the system to learn from data in order to recognize and develop patterns, trends, and correlations. In the case of a broadcast TV interview, for example, OSINT intelligence can identify both the interviewer and the interaction between the interviewer (through video analytics), the key topics of discussion (through speech and text analytics), how viewers react in social media (through text analytics), and automatically provide, say, viewers’ opinion groups, trends, and thoughts.
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What exactly is the OSINT Framework?
Collection of information from a variety of sources takes time, but there are several methods available to make intelligence gathering easier. While you may be familiar with tools such as Shodan and port scanners such as Nmap and Zenmap, the whole set of tools is extensive. Fortunately, security researchers have begun to describe the available tools.
The OSINT Framework created by Justin Nordine is a wonderful place to start. The framework ties to a broad array of tools for various purposes, such as harvesting email addresses and exploring social media or the dark web.
