Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

OSINT Tools … Recommendations List

Free OSINT Tools.

With the New Year fast approaching I thought now would be a great time to post the first draft of some recommended Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) gathering tools and resources. I will look to maintain this list overtime and have it grow, so if you come across something you think should be on the list, drop me an email or leave a comment for consideration.

The reconnaissance phase of any engagement is very important and can often save you alot of time and of course money. If you are really lucky you may even find the information you are looking for freely available posted online. Either way the information you find will only be as good as the tools you use, so with this in mind here is the list based on tools I have come across over the years or have been recommended by other InfoSec peeps.

* Please note even though the aim is to provide information for free OSINT Tools, some may require a subscription or commercial fee.

Spokeo – People search engine and free white pages finds phone, address, email, and photos. Find people by name, email, address, and phone for free.
theHarvester – This tool is intended to help Penetration testers in the early stages of the penetration test in order to understand the customer footprint on the Internet. It is also useful for anyone that wants to know what an attacker can see about their organization.
Foca – FOCA 3.2 Free is a fingerprinrint and information gathering tool for pentesters. It searchs for servers, domains, URLS and public documents and print out discoverd information in a network tree. It also searches for data leaks such as metadata, directory listing, unsecure HTTP methods, .listing or .DS_Store files, actived cache in DNS Serves, etc…
Shodan – Search for computers based on software, geography, operating system, IP address and more
Maltego – Maltego is a unique platform developed to deliver a clear threat picture to the environment that an organization owns and operates. Maltego’s unique advantage is to demonstrate the complexity and severity of single points of failure as well as trust relationships that exist currently within the scope of your infrastructure.
Deep Magic – Search for DNS records and other fun stuff
Jigsaw – Jigsaw is a prospecting tool used by sales professionals, marketers and recruiters to get fresh and accurate sales leads and business contact information.
Hoovers – Search over 85 million companies within 900 industry segments; Hoover’s Reports Easy-to-read reports on key competitors, financials, and executives
Market Visual – Search Professionals by Name, Company or Title
FoxOne Scanner – Non- Invasive and Non-Detectable WebServer Reconnaissance Scanner
Creepy – creepy is an application that allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services.
Recorded Future – Recorded Future intelligence analysis tools help analysts understand trends in big data, and foresee what may happen in the future. Groundbreaking algorithms extract temporal and predictive signals from unstructured text. Recorded Future organizes this information, delineates results over interactive timelines, visualizes past trends, and maps future events– all while providing traceability back to sources. From OSINT to classified data, Recorded Future offers innovative, massively scalable solutions.
MobiStealth – Mobistealth Cell Phone Spy Software empowers you to get the answers you truly want and deserve. Including a host of advanced surveillance features, our Cell Phone Spy Software secretly monitors all cell phone activities and sends the information back to your Mobistealth user account.
Snoopy – Snoopy is a distributed tracking and profiling framework
Stalker – STALKER is a tool to reconstruct all captured traffic (wired or wireless alike) and parse out all of the “interesting” information disclosures.  It goes beyond just grabbing passwords and emails out of the air as it attempts to build a complete profile of your target(s).  You would be amazed at how much data you can collect in 15 minutes.
LinkedIn Maps – Your professional world. Visualized. Map your professional network to understand the relationships between you and your connections
LittleSis – LittleSis is a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government.
Entity Cube – EntityCube is a research prototype for exploring object-level search technologies, which automatically summarizes the Web for entities (such as people, locations and organizations) with a modest web presence.
TinEye – TinEye is a reverse image search engine built by Idée currently in beta. Give it an image and it will tell you where the image appears on the web.
Google Hacking DB – Google Search Query Fu to find the secret sauce
ServerSniff – ServerSniff.net – Your free “Swiss Army Knife” for networking, serverchecks and routing with many many little toys and tools for administrators, webmasters, developers, powerusers und security-aware users.
MyIPNeighbours – My IP Neighbors lets you find out if any other web sites (“virtual hosts”) are hosted on a given web server.
Social Mention – Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and more
Glass Door – Search jobs then look inside. Company salaries, reviews, interview questions, and more – all posted anonymously by employees and job seekers.
NameCHK – Check to see if your desired username or vanity url is still available at dozens of popular Social Networking and Social Bookmarking websites.
Scythe – The ability to test a range of email addresses (or account names) across a range of websites (e.g. social media, blogging platforms, etc…) to find where those “targets” have active accounts.
Recon-NG – A nice Python Script that automates recon on LinkedIn, Jigsaw, Shodan and some search engine fu.
Pushpin – Awesome little Python script that will identify every tweet, flicker pic and Youtube video within an area of a specific Geo address.
Silobreaker – Enterprise Semantic Search Engine, allows virtualisation of data, analytics and exploration of key data.
Google Trends – See what are the popular related topics people are searching for. This will help widen your search scope.
Google Alerts – Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your queries.
Addict-o-matic – Nice little search aggregator. Allows you to enter a search term and build a page from search and social networking sites.
PasteLert – PasteLert is a simple system to search pastebin.com and set up alerts (like google alerts) for pastebin.com entries. This means you will automatically recieve email whenever your term(s) is/are found in new pastebin entries!
Kurrently – Real Time Search Engine for Social Media.
CheckUsernames – Check for usernames across 160 Social Networking Sites.
Whos Talkin – social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most.
192 – Search for People, Businesses and Places in the UK.
Esearchy – Esearchy is a small library capable of searching the internet for email addresses. It can also search for emails within supported documents.
TouchGraph SEO – Java based tool for importing and visualising various data types.

Its not listed above, but of course popular Social Networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and alike have a wealth of information. Of course also consider older sources that are now less popular, its amazing what people leave behind on stuff like MySpace. Also remember that search engines show you stuff thats popular, not perhaps the obscure stuff you are searching for, so get creative with your search queries and use the various tools at your disposal.

Lastly I will add alot of Social Engineers dont have alot of global exposure, so do your homework of where you are targeting. If you are targeting Japan for example their number 1 Social Network is not Facebook, so you need to do recon in the right places, and put in the extra legwork to gain the relevant access.

Emotions and Social Networks

We’ve all either have told someone or have been told by someone that “this is not personal it’s business”.  The concept of keeping personal stuff personal and work stuff at the workplace is now becoming a thing of the past.

According to the Business Insider you can now throw caution to the wind and blur the lines.  They report that our emotions aren’t controlled anyway (even if we are trying to control them) and are already affecting our co-workers.  A recent Gallup Poll analysis shows that our well being has an impact on the people we work with and on the people who work for us.

The poll’s results suggest that emotion travels over social networks in much the same way viruses do.

The study included 105 teams and 1,740 individuals whose well being was measured in three six-month intervals. The average team size was 22 members, and the minimum team size was five members.

Researchers Nicholas Christakis M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., and James Fowler, Ph.D., showed in additional research that emotion travels over social networks in much the same way viruses do. Harter purports, “Based on this previous research, we expected to see that the well being connection within teams would be much stronger than that among employees who were not members of the same team.  But the surprising finding was that the relationship between supervisors’ well being and that of their direct reports grew substantially over time.”

The study’s results suggest that the mental state of a person’s boss will influence the individual’s mental state; therefore, an employee’s attitude is a direct reflection of their boss’ attitude.  So, being a good boss has a positive and most likely productive influence on the company.  Whereas being a negative boss will have a negative impact on the company.

Agrawl, a gallup research manager, expounds, “…meaning that individuals are likely influenced by the shared culture of their team.”  Harter continues, “There is plenty of evidence that wellbeing is shared within existing formal and informal networks and that it spreads based on social ties. ”

What kind of boss do you have?  Does your workplace attitude reflect your boss’ attitude?

Scared to Death…Literally. The Emotion of Fear

Scientists have been studying fear for quite some time and it is a fact that you can be “scared to death”.  NPR has reported on the phenomenon of Voodoo Death as doctors refer to it.

Dr. Martin Samuels interviewed with NPR and this is some of what he said:

Well, it’s a strong emotional reaction of any kind [that can cause Voodoo death]. It can be positive, as you said in the lead, or negative. And when this happens suddenly, there is a pulse of autonomic activity, we call it, which means automatic activity of the brain, which releases chemicals, natural chemicals related to adrenaline, which I’m sure everybody has heard about.  And that chemical is mainly good, but there’s a small, small risk that it can do harm to the various organs, including your heart.

The interviewer goes onto ask Dr. Samuel, “And you say it doesn’t have to be a scary experience”.  Dr. Samuels response, “No, just a sudden,usually unexpected powerful emotional experience.  A scary experience would be one example of it, but a powerful positive emotion can do it as well.  I have an example of a guy who hit a hole in one, he played golf his whole life and hit a ball over a rise and didn’t see where it went.  He and his partner went over and looked down on the green, and the ball was in the hole.  And he said wow, I hit a hole in one, I can die now, and he did.”

Extreme you say?  Maybe, but science has confirmed that it does happen.  This just might make you think twice next time you decide to pull a prank on someone.  If you’d like to listen to the entire Podcast click here.

What do you think about Voodoo Death?  Do you have an experience with this you can share with the Humintell Community?