Digital forensics

Top 7 tools for intelligence-gathering purposes

Experts can often collect significant artifacts related to the authors behind the analyzed scenarios during cybersecurity exercises, including details such as emails, usernames, IP addresses, domains, and so on. This article will provide you with a list of online tools to help you discover and track criminals' identities, their secrets, or even geolocation.

Learn Digital Forensics

Build your skills with hands-on forensics training for computers, mobile devices, networks and more.

Start Learning

1. ';--have i been pwned?

Have I Been Pwned allows searching across multiple data breaches if a specific email address or phone number has been compromised. It can be used, for instance, to verify that an email collected during a forensics exercise exists. Because the Have I Been Pwned shows all the databases where the email is breached, it can be possible to obtain the email:password combination. With this in place, experts can get further data related to criminals or even access criminals’ systems posing as the target crook.

URL: https://haveibeenpwned.com

2. intelx.io

IntelligenceX is an open-source Intelligence and forensics arsenal that helps experts during their cyber investigations. As shown below, many features and tools are available, including the “email” tool that can help identify what leaked passwords and additional information is associated with a specific email.

URL: https://intelx.io/tools

3. Whois Lookup

Whois Lookup is a large database of whois information on DNS, domain names, name servers, IP addresses, registrar and owner data, and so on. Looking up the owner's information, including the email address, can be a great start during an investigation. After that, using the tools mentioned above can be a great player during this game.

URL: https://whois.domaintools.com/

4. ViewDNS

This multi-tool website can help identify all the sites hosted on a given web server, including domain and IP, reverse whois lookup, finding domain names and their owners, and so on.

URL: https://viewdns.info

5. Sherlock

Sherlock is a tool that can find valid accounts on target websites given a specific username or email address. As its authors say, it can “hunt down social media accounts by username across social networks.”

URL: https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock

6. Instant Username Search

Instant Username Search is a tool capable of checking more than 100 social media sites and verifying if a specific username is available. This tool can be very useful for obtaining additional details on the target usernames.

URL: https://instantusername.com/

Learn Digital Forensics

Build your skills with hands-on forensics training for computers, mobile devices, networks and more.

Start Learning

7. spiderfoot

As mentioned by its creators on the GitHub page, SpiderFoot is an open-source intelligence (OSINT) automation tool. It integrates with just about every data source available and utilizes a range of methods for data analysis, making that data easy to navigate.

SpiderFoot is available as an embedded web server for providing a clean and intuitive web-based interface but can also be used completely via the command line. 

URL: https://github.com/smicallef/spiderfoot

 

Sources

OSINT Tools, GitBook Segurança-Informática