Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)

Glossary

What is Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)?

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is acquiring and analysing publicly available data to assess threats, judge, or answer specific questions or concerns.

Many organisations utilise OSINT as a cybersecurity technique to evaluate security risks and spot vulnerabilities in their IT systems. Moreover, cybercriminals and hackers employ OSINT techniques for social engineering, phishing, and exposing targets to conduct cyberattacks.

However, OSINT may also be used in fields other than cybersecurity, including law enforcement, national security, marketing, journalism, and academic study.

How OSINT Works

Since World War II, highly trained intelligence agents have monitored open-source material such as radio broadcasts, newspapers, and market swings. Given the number and range of readily available data sources, almost anyone can now engage in open-source intelligence gathering.

OSINT researchers obtain data from a variety of public sources, such as:

  1. Newspapers, periodicals, news sites, or any published and online news media.
  2. Internet search engines include Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex.
  3. Manage social media profiles on Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
  4. Use online forums, blogs, and IRC.
  5. Online directories for phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses.
  6. Public records cover births, deaths, court documents, and company filings.
  7. Municipal, state, and federal government records include meeting transcripts, budgets, speeches, and news releases.
  8. Conducted academic research, including papers, theses, and journals.

However, a clear goal should be set before any data gathering from OSINT sources begins. For example, security professionals who utilise OSINT must first establish which insights they want to unearth and whether public data would provide the desired outcomes.

After the public information has been obtained, it must be processed to remove unneeded or redundant data. Security professionals can then generate an actionable intelligence report using the enhanced data.

How do hackers use OSINT?

Threat actors frequently employ OSINT to gather sensitive information that they can utilise to exploit computer network vulnerabilities.

This could include personal information about an organisation’s employees, partners, and vendors that is easily accessible via social media and company websites. Technical information, such as credentials, security flaws, or encryption keys, may emerge in the source code of web pages or cloud services. Public websites also post potentially compromising information from data breaches, such as stolen logins and passwords.

Cybercriminals can utilise this public data for several illicit activities.

For example, they could utilise personal information from social networks to build personalised phishing emails that persuade readers to click on a harmful link. Or perform a Google search using precise commands that reveal security flaws in a web application, a process known as “Google dorking.”

They may also avoid discovery during a hacking attempt by analysing a company’s public assets to describe their cybersecurity protection strategies.

OSINT for Cybersecurity

For these reasons, many organisations conduct OSINT assessments of publicly available information about their systems, applications, and human resources.

The findings can be used to track down unlawful leaks of proprietary or sensitive data, assess information security, and identify vulnerabilities, including unpatched software, misconfigurations, and open ports. Organisations may also conduct penetration testing on their systems and networks utilising the same OSINT data that cybercriminals and hackers have public access to.

Typically, the information collected during an OSINT assessment is combined with non-public data to create a more comprehensive threat intelligence report. Frequent updates to OSINT cybersecurity assessments can help organisations mitigate the risk of data breaches, ransomware, malware and other cyberattacks.

OSINT Tools

Because so much public information is available, manually collecting, sorting, and analysing OSINT data is typically impractical. Specialised open-source intelligence technologies can help organise and automate data tasks for various OSINT applications.

Some OSINT analysis systems employ artificial intelligence and machine learning to determine important, relevant, trivial, or irrelevant information.

How can iZOOlogic help my Company or Organisation?

Find out how iZOOlogic can provide or protect your infrastructure with Open-source intelligence (OSINT) through our Threat Visualisation solutions under our Threat Management Services.

To find out more about how iZOOlogic can help protect your company’s cyber security, schedule a demo.