OSINT | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Social engineering is advancing fast, at the speed of generative AI. This is offering bad actors multiple new tools and techniques for researching, scoping, and exploiting organizations. In a recent communication, the FBI pointed out: 'As technology continues to evolve, so do cybercriminals' tactics.' This article explores some of the impacts of this GenAI-fueled acceleration. And examines what it means for IT leaders responsible for managing defenses and mitigating vulnerabilities. More realism, better pretexting, and multi-lingual attack scenarios Traditional social engineering methods usually involve impersonating someone the target knows. The attacker may hide behind email to communicate, adding some psychological triggers to boost the chances of a successful breach. Maybe a request to act urgently, so the target is less likely to pause and develop doubts. Or making the email come from an employee's CEO, hoping the employee's respect for authority means they won't question...

Recently the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) unveiled a new strategy for open-source intelligence (OSINT) and referred to OSINT as the "INT of first resort". Public and private sector organizations are realizing the value that the discipline can provide but are also finding that the exponential growth of digital data in recent years has overwhelmed many traditional OSINT methods. Thankfully, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are starting to provide a transformative impact on the future of information gathering and analysis.  What is Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT)? Open-Source Intelligence refers to the collection and analysis of information from publicly available sources. These sources can include traditional media, social media platforms, academic publications, government reports, and any other data that is openly accessible. The key characteristic of OSINT is that it does not involve covert or clandestine methods of information ga...

On April 5, 2023, the FBI and Dutch National Police  announced the takedown of Genesis Market , one of the largest dark web marketplaces. The operation, dubbed "Operation Cookie Monster," resulted in the arrest of 119 people and the seizure of over $1M in cryptocurrency. You can read the FBI's warrant  here  for details specific to this case. In light of these events, I'd like to discuss how OSINT can assist with dark web investigations. The Dark Web's anonymity attracts a variety of users, from whistleblowers and political activists to cybercriminals and terrorists. There are several techniques that can be used to try and identify the individuals behind these sites and personas. Technical Vulnerabilities While not considered OSINT, there have been instances when technical vulnerabilities have existed in the technology used to host dark websites. These vulnerabilities may exist in the software itself or be due to misconfigurations, but they can sometimes revea...

Threat hunting is an essential component of your cybersecurity strategy. Whether you're getting started or in an advanced state, this article will help you ramp up your threat intelligence program. What is Threat Hunting? The cybersecurity industry is shifting from a reactive to a proactive approach. Instead of waiting for cybersecurity alerts and then addressing them, security organizations are now deploying red teams to actively seek out breaches, threats and risks, so they can be isolated. This is also known as "threat hunting."  Why is Threat Hunting Required? Threat hunting complements existing prevention and detection security controls. These controls are essential for mitigating threats. However, they are optimized for low false positive alerting. Hunt solutions, on the other hand, are optimized for low false negatives. This means that the anomalies and outliers that are considered false positives for detection solutions, are hunting solutions' leads, to b...

Security researchers at Trustwave have released a new open-source tool that uses facial recognition technology to locate targets across numerous social media networks on a large scale. Dubbed Social Mapper, the facial recognition tool automatically searches for targets across eight social media platforms, including—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, the Russian social networking site VKontakte, and China's Weibo and Douban—based on their names and pictures. The tool's creators claim they developed Social Mapper intelligence-gathering tool predominantly to help pen testers and red teamers with social engineering attacks. Although the searches of names and pictures can already be performed manually, Social Mapper makes it possible to automate such scans far faster and "on a mass scale with hundreds or thousands of individuals" at once. "Performing intelligence gathering online is a time-consuming process, it typically starts by attempting to...

A Free Chrome, Firefox and Safari web browser plugin floating around the web, called ' Sell Hack ' allows users to view the hidden email address of any LinkedIn user, means anyone can grab email addresses that we use for professional purposes. When installed, the ' Sell Hack ' plugin will pop up a ' Hack In ' button on LinkedIn profiles and further automatically mines email addresses of LinkedIn users. NOT A SECURITY BREACH It's not a Security breach, LinkedIn has confirmed that no LinkedIn data has been compromised, but rather this free extension rely on an algorithm that checks publicly available data in order to guess users' email addresses. So without exploiting any loophole or vulnerability, Sell Hack is capable of predicting users' email addresses with OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) techniques i.e. information collected from publicly available sources. It is also possible that, the Sell Hack extension is gathering data from ...

In the recent months I had the opportunity to conduct an interesting study on the use of Social Media in the Military Sector, large diffusion of media platforms makes them very attractive for governments and intelligence agencies . Social media platforms reveal enormous potentiality that could be exploited also in critical sectors such as military and defense. Modern social media networks are actively used by every government, the US, China and Russia are the most active in this field, but also emerging cyber countries like Iran and North Korea demonstrates an increasing interest in the matter. The principal uses of social media for government are Psychological Operations (PsyOps) OSInt Cyber espionage Offensive purposes On May 10th the Illinois Air National Guard 183rd Fighter Wing published a notice in the monthly issue of a newsletter titled Falcon View. The notice, that seems to be authentic, dedicates a paragraph to the use of social networking sites for...

Most of the readers have question in mind that, How hackers know everything about their target ? How to DOX (finding personal information) someone ? So answer is --  Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). A Patriot Hacker ' The Jester ' (or "th3j35t3r") who made his name after harassing Anonymous activist group, disrupting WikiLeaks and stalking "jihadist" sites has finally list his all time favorite Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) toolset. Open Source intelligence (OSINT) is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence. Hacker posted list of some free available tools on his blog , includes Maltego, Creepy, Spokeo, CaseFile, FoxOne Scanner (Jester's Edition). OSINT is defined by both the U.S. Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Department of Defense, as " produced from publicly available information that is co...