Down the Rabbit Hole an Osint Journey

Book excerpt: Do you enjoy the reconnaissance part of a penetration testing? Want to discover issues on your network, assets or applications proactively? Would you like to learn some new OSINT based recon tools and techniques? Follow the rabbit hole and find exploitable critical vulnerabilities in the Panama Papers law firm and politics both American and international including Trump and the DNC. Analyse network and email configurations for entry points and exploits with FOCA, Maltego, Nmap/ZenMap, and Spiderfoot. Learn how to use advanced searches, alternative search engines that don't respect robots.txt., intel tools, and leak databases. Open source intelligence gathering (OSINT) and web-based reconnaissance is an important part of penetration testing and proactive defense. The more connected we are, the more information is held about everything. Yummy, juicy information for both a penetration tester or a malicious actor. Learning what sources of are available to start your search is an important first step in learning about reconnaissance and how the information could be utilized or resold. Both issues you or your client need to know. All of the tools and techniques in this book can be ninjafied with Python, Ruby or PowerShell. Initially, this book began as a presentation at the Cyber Senate Industrial Control Cybersecurity Nuclear Summit in Warrington, UK 2016. Originally, I intended to use some of the same techniques to target a nuclear power plant or someone in a nuclear regulatory capacity. After submitting my original talk idea. Daesh, otherwise known as ISIS, began publicly threatening the European nuclear industry. Due to the threats, we decided it wasn't in anyone's best interest to give a how to target nuclear installations and changed the target instead to the law firm behind the Panama Papers fiasco. The project expanded to include additional targets with mostly a political slant. 2016 was a very tumultuous year in politics. Brexit, Trump, and the rise of the interesting politics and coups in Turkey, Netherlands, Germany, Russia, Bulgaria and the Philippines. It's a lot more fun to learn about a topic in an empowering way. Also, only politicians like politicians. They make a fun target. Learning a new technique is easier when it's fun. I chose targets and case studies which gave me a happy hacker smile.