OSINT
One of the important ways of gathering information about targets is through the usage of open sources of information. This is often designated as open-source intelligence. It consists on using available open sources of information that can be used to gather information that is publicly available about a target.
Google Hacking Database (GHDB)
Google Hacking Database (GHDB) is actually a database with a set of pre-formatted queries that might be used in the Google search engine to search for interesting information.
Here are some "interesting" that you might try, as a way to obtain information from the Google search engine:
You may look and try other queries.
Shodan
Another important source of open-source intelligence is Shodan. Shodan is a search engine for Internet-connected devices. Shodan gathers information about all devices directly connected to the Internet. If a device is directly hooked up to the Internet then Shodan queries it for various publicly-available information. The types of devices that are indexed can vary tremendously: ranging from small desktops up to nuclear power plants and everything in between.
This search engine is quite interesting and allows you to query for products and services all around the world. As per the description presented above, everything that is connected to the Internet is indexed by Shodan.
You may try to conduct some queries on the search engine. It is important that you read the search query fundamentals to use it properly.
Here are some interesting queries you might try:
You may also use Shodan from the command line interface. This is already include in Kali Linux.
Will display the help of the command.
Before using this command you need to create a Shodan account and use the provided API key to initialize the tool.
After that you can start querying Shodan:
Which will produce the required results:
Please beware that since we are using free Shodan accounts functionalities and results will be quite limited.
Also, since Shodan is a commercial service, the terms and conditions of the free tier of the service may change without notice, and some of the functionalities reported here might not work.
The terms and conditions of the usage of Shodan are listed in this page.
Last updated