Reconnaissance is when a investigator or hacker actively looking for any vulnerable information about their target. one of the techniques is to use Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).
Picking the right tool will help you with tracking your target, these are the tools that I have played around and test out myself as target.
Social Media is the number 1 source for your reconnaissance, its posts with photos or video can tell you where able was the photo taken and etc...
one of popular paid tool is Maltego - specializes in uncovering relationships among people, companies, domains and publicly accessible information on the internet. It’s also known for taking the sometimes enormous amount of discovered information and plotting it all out in easy-to-read charts and graphs. The graphs do a good job of taking raw intelligence and making it actionable, and each graph can have up to 10,000 data points.
The Maltego program works by automating the searching of different public data sources, so users can click on one button and execute multiple queries. A search plan is called a “transform action” by the program, and Maltego comes with quite a few by default that include common sources of public information like DNS records, whois records, search engines and social networks. Because the program is using public interfaces to perform its searching, it’s compatible with almost any source of information that has a public interface, so adding more searches to a transform action or making up a whole new one is easily possible.
Once the information is gathered, Maltego makes connections that can unmask the hidden relationships between names, email addresses, aliases, companies, websites, document owners, affiliations and other information that might prove useful in an investigation, or to look for potential future problems. The program itself runs in Java, so it works with Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.
There is a free version of the program with limited features called Maltego CE. Desktop versions of Maltego XL run $1,999 per instance. Server installations for large-scale commercial use start at $40,000 and come with a complete training program. (paragraph credit to csoonline)
Another tool that I use is BuiltWith.
As the name implies, BuiltWith lets you find what popular websites are built with. Different tech stacks and platforms power different sites. BuiltWith can, for example, detect whether a website is using WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal as its CMS and provide further details.
BuiltWith also generates a neat list of known JavaScript/CSS libraries (e.g., jQuery or Bootstrap) that a website uses. Further, the service provides a list of plugins installed on the websites, frameworks, server information, analytics and tracking information, etc. BuiltWith can be used for reconnaissance purposes.
What’s more? Combine BuiltWith with website security scanners like WPScan that, for example, integrate with WordPress Vulnerability Database API to spot common security vulnerabilities impacting a website.
For those looking to identify mainly the tech stack makeup of a site, Wappalyzer may be better suited as it provides a more focused, concise output. Try both BuiltWith and Wappalyzer for yourself and see which suits your needs better. (paragraph credit to csoonline).
To be continued...
