Moving Past Just Googling It: Harvesting and Using OSINT | SANS@MIC Talk
Every single day we use search engines to look for things on the internet. Defenders research a domain or IP that contains malware. Attackers look for email addresses for an upcoming phishing campaign. DFIR people examine locations and usernames that they acquired from a subjects computer. Policy and compliance people examine the risk that employees in their organizations might bring to work. Recruiters scour the internet looking for candidates. And «normal people» shop, date, geolocate, post, tweet, and otherwise send a huge amount of data to the public internet. While search engines harvest, store, and index billions of web site data points every day, there is much they do not contain. These pieces of OSINT data can, when put in perspective and analyzed, reveal target geolocations, friends and associates, alcohol consumption, user passwords, and more. This talk will be a series of hands on, live demos where we put our OSINT skills to work in unconventional places to harvest this unindexed OSINT data. Using free web sites, built in web browser tools, and free python scripts, Micah will show attendees how to harvest data from social media applications, the «whois» system, and from breach data that will not appear in search engine results. Students will gain a better understanding of JSON, APIs, reverse whois, and how to run python tools. Come join Micah as he examines how to move beyond «Googling it» in your personal and professional lives.
Speaker Bio
Micah Hoffman has been active in the information technology field since 1998, working with federal government, commercial, and internal customers to discover and quantify cybersecurity weaknesses within their organizations. As a highly active member of the cybersecurity and OSINT communities, Micah uses his real-world Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), penetration testing, and incident response experience to provide customized solutions to his customers and comprehensive instruction to his students.
Over the years, Micah has conducted cyber-related tasks like penetration testing, OSINT investigations, APT hunting, and risk assessments for government, internal, and commercial customers. Micahs SANS coursework, cybersecurity expertise, and inherent love of teaching eventually pulled him toward an instructional role, and hes been a SANS Certified Instructor since 2013. Hes the author of the SANS course SEC487: Open Source Intelligence Gathering and Analysis, and also teaches both SEC542: Web App Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking and SEC567: Social Engineering for Penetration Testers.