Delivering hands-on learning in the most secure way | Penetration Testing | Product Security Engineer at Skillable, where people learn by doing
Penetration Testing Tip of the Week! Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is an extremely valuable tool of pentests, but it is still just a tool - and, like any tool, it can be abused for evil. Take the example I saw last week of a man (who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) who did OSINT against a CISO at a major car company. On the one hand, he did a decent OSINT job. He researched her, found her LinkedIn profile and did some analysis. At this point, though, he decided to publicly shame this CISO and her apparent lack of cybersecurity experience. The tool of OSINT abused for evil purposes (public shaming). When you are performing a pentest, you are trying to use these hacker tools and techniques for good - not evil. So, what sort of data or information are we trying to get from OSINT? 🔸 Additional domains/subdomains that the target company owns 🔸 Additional external hosts or subnets that the target company owns 🔸 Potential technology in use and version numbers (if able) 🔸 Types of external facing services and version numbers (if able) 🔸 List of existing employees, including titles, contact information, and physical locations 🔸 Email format of the target company (to extrapolate any employee contact information if an email wasn't found) 🔸 Previous passwords or breach data 🔸 Hobbies, backgrounds, and potential security question answers for employees 🔸 Passwords, secret keys, or API keys exposed by the company inadvertently All of this information is handled securely and privately to test the security of the company -- never to publicly shame an employee, particularly when you don't even work with the relevant employee and know their personal story. That way, we use tools for ethical purposes - and not for evil. #security #cybersecurity #penetrationtesting #pentests #osint #reconnaissance