Put interest to you and your organization using methods that are openly available they are totally legal
and they give you an enormous breadth of knowledge about a specific person group or entity.
So if we take a look at defining open source intelligence it's basically defined as obtaining that information
from open sources such as TV other types of media newspapers online forums and any accessible means
of communication that's publicly available.
A big part of open source intelligence is also social media.
So anything and everything you ever post on Twitter on Facebook on or which ever social media outlets
are out there rest assured that the Gladstein intelligence services all are basically recording this
information.
It's not exactly interception interception is something else we'll get to that later section but everything
and anything that is online at some point in time through some type of web site or social media is being
monitored being analyzed and all those tweets and all those posts that you do are basically being recorded
to figure out whether you are interesting or not.
Now the interesting thing about open source Intel is if we take a look at the intelligence services
or the cost of intelligence and compare that with HUMINT human is human intelligence and basically requires
people to talk to people.
There's a human interaction.
And so as a result of that it's extremely costly.
It's probably the most expensive piece of information gathering that a service or that a corporation
or security department if you're collecting information about potential enemies competitors et cetera.
That is the most expensive way of collecting information.
And it's also the riskiest because the risk of you getting exposed is very very high.
Now if you work in the Gladstein services then the risk is even higher because if your enemy finds out
you're doing this then they can capture your agents or the people that you deploy to try to find that
information such as informers.
So moving on more and more of these classifying agencies and also local law enforcement and national
law enforcement are using open source Intel as well as corporations.
So it's not just governments this is businesses too and this kind of gets a bit scary because if you
take a look at the information that's out there and how easy it is to collect a lot of people that do
post in social media don't understand the ramifications of using quote unquote free services to post
anything and everything that you're thinking about.
So I would suggest if you do have a profile on social media to create fake profiles to basically post
things that sometimes are absolutely different from your actual personality to avoid people creating
a specific type of profile on you that would actually fit so use the human nature to your advantage
of being dynamic because anyone and everyone is using open source Intel to collect information on you.
OK so basically the classified intelligence services normal corporations use this type of information
and they create interest or comic groups for advertising from Malvern ties.
And just to collect general information on how to sell products basically what's going on who's popular
who's not popular.
How many followers you have et cetera.
So the good thing about open source intel if you look at this from collection it's low risk low investment
and you actually have very high information returns but you also have a high collection and success
rate of getting any information on a specific person interest group et cetera.
So it's a pro and con.
So first of obviously your online activities are being monitored whether you believe this or not doesn't
make doesn't matter.
That's just a fact.
And there are different tools that you can use to collect this.
And once you start doing this you'll start to get extremely paranoid.
Just like I am but it's a healthy kind of paranoia.
Just to be aware of the things that are going on outside.
Right.
So the thing about open source Intel is you can get so much information that that's also a drawback.
You still need people you still need human interaction to an extent to go through the information that
automated agents a.p eyes Exige or can collect and analyze.
Even if you have very good algorithms that do this and I've created some solutions in the past that
basically use information from social media API eyes and these algorithms scrub the data they give me
back reports and there are some Web sites I'll show you that do exactly the same thing with Web back
ends or front ends excuse me and basically database back ends like map reduce etc..
So this very good technology out there that's open source whether it's Cloudera Hortonworks et cetera
that take this unstructured data and prepare it into a way shape or form that you can use for these
different types of reports.
So open source can tell it's basically classified as legal surveillance and it is legal.
You know so since these are open sources that the information whether it's scarier or not or whether
it's ethical or not that's a totally different discussion.
All these sources are perfectly legal and anyone and everyone can collect this information and there's
not really that much you can do about it unless you are aware of this first thing.
And second thing when you post things.
Be very careful about how you post things even if you use multiple accounts.
There's ways of tracking you back to IPS even if you do use proxies.
So just be aware of this and we'll get into some of that technology a bit later into the espionage.
So cyber espionage piece.
So it basically open source Intel makes us security folks very concerned because anyone and everyone
has access to this information and they can collect it.
And there's not really that much you can do about it.
I mean there's some certain things you can do.
But basically the most that you can do here is prevention and basically being careful about the things
when and how you post information on the Internet because even if it's not the type of person that you
are.
Folks that collect this information will interpret this as your view.
So you need to be a bit careful about the things that you post if it's under your own name.
So the following areas.
Use open source Intel.
So corporations and businesses academia government military classified intelligence services obviously
law enforcement even employers.
And last but not least hackers.
So we said before that over 80 to 90 percent of the classical hacking steps is basically gathering intelligence.
Now if you do this the right way then you're going to be capturing as much intelligence as you can about
your actual target.
But be aware that if you're doing this other people are doing this too and you may be the target of
someone else.
And this is something that's extremely important to know.
For instance if you're posting comments or anything about any interest groups hacktivists or something
else that will get ticked off or -- off that you're doing something so be aware that these different
types of groups do this kind of stuff.
Be aware of the types the types of posts that you do make sure that if you do these things you protect
yourself your privacy Excedrin
So there's different types of tools that we use with an open source Intel.
There's so many of them that I'm not going to list them all I'm just going to take one or two examples
so that you get the gist of how you can collect information and then basically use you know your hacker
mentality to verify what I'm telling you throughout the entire training.
By the way I just you know explore these things.
So there's different ways of collecting examples and the tools are obviously the obvious ones like the
media newspaper CNN C-SPAN etc..
Newspapers and forums that kind of stuff.
Obviously also harvesting information from the different types of social media networks and they're
different harvesting tools out there that you can use to get tweets get the influence that someone has
access from multi go is a second one.
I love multi-fuel I use it for a lot of my intelligence gathering.
So multihull is really cool because it's basically what we call a meta search engine and I love this
thing.
I'll show you a very quick example that later because Monteagle lets you collect all types of information
from seed accounts from Twitter accounts from emails from certificates Web sites that you visit all
kinds of stuff.
And this is really comprehensive.
It's really frightening to an extent that the information you can collect but it's really good at harvesting
a lot of different things.
Of course it will capture so much information that you need to decide what makes sense and what you
want to basically go after.
But Monteagle is one of the best tools that you could use for open source Intel for hacking anyway.
And just generally for finding out the information that's out on you on the internet.
Excedrin Google works or Google hacking is another way that you can get a lot of information now in
the past when I've done presentations for HP IBM Fujitsu and the other guys when I did my live hacking
sessions a lot of the things that I did in the intelligence phase basically used Google dorks or Google
hacking database to search for information online about people that post private pictures all kinds
of stuff and there was some really embarrassing stuff out there that people don't know that they have
online.
I mean we're talking about pictures where people are half naked.
Yeah.
They're messing around with a whole bunch of different things that they shouldn't be doing and all these
pictures all this type of information all this media was available on the Internet and these folks didn't
even know about it.
Now Foca is also another tool that's very frequently used to harvest meta data from various different
data sources and data files.
So if you see someone posting a document and you want to find out who the actual author was Foca is
a tool that you can use to basically collect information harvest all that meta data from those things
that are posted online.
Last but not least and I love this tool to showdown.
Is the hackers Swiss Army knife of finding vulnerabilities.
This thing is absolutely amazing.
If you're into hacking and testing the security of your systems showdown is one of the most fantastic
ways and very easy ways without risking anything about searching for different types of vulnerabilities
based on OS is based on technology.
For instance one of the hacks that were out there that I witnessed myself boys Western Digital and other
Nesse storage solutions that unfortunately were delivered to customers like you and me and everyone
else without security enabled.
That means that as soon as you connected these network attached storage is on your wife's eyes they
were publicly accessible through the Internet.
And what a lot of hackers did in this case is they use Sjodin to search for these Western Digital NASA's
and other NASA's because they knew that they were open to attacks and they basically collected all the
data that you had on these.
NASA's in your private network.
So yeah I know that these tools are out there know how to use them because hackers are using them.
So let's take a look at Montego in a little bit more detail.
So multi go is a really fantastic tool and it's very comprehensive.
We could easily spend a week on Monteagle.
And usually when I do personal trainings we spend a lot of time on tools like multi-grain because it
can help you gather a lot of information.
So what we're seeing in this picture is on the top we have the different types of organization of the
data that you see.
We have what we call entities on the right.
We have the pallets that comprise devices infrastructure locations and stuff that you can modify for
personal information penetration testing that you have.
And this basically starts off collecting all the information that is in some way shape or form accessible
from the internet about your target.
Now here we see different IPs.
These IPs are Web sites these Web sites use technology.
They have e-mails.
They have people that browse it.
There are people that post on it.
So for instance if you took Twitter you'd wind up with these entities and in Twitter you can start finding
out who posts what.
And you can keep on digging until you find out which people are the ones that are posting on Twitter.
And you can find out through their e-mails what locations they're in are they in the U.S. and Europe
in New Zealand or China or Russia Excedrin.
You can find a lot of things out with Monteagle and this thing is so versatile you can or it's actually
worth your while to take a look at multi go pack Nerva is the Web site.
And I have that in the reference section later so you can just download this and try it out.
If you have any questions please just give me an email or a call or whatever.
Mulki go is the tool you should learn how to use not only for yourself and your own security but also
if you're in the cyber security space you're a security team.
You need to know how to use multi go right so you can get the IP addresses get the technology of Web
sites you can do a lot of different things.
You can use this as a seed platform to get even more intelligence.
This is a very solid piece of the open source Intel toolkit as well as the hackers toolkit know what
use it understand it so the other one that we talked about was show --.
And showdown is also another tool where the rubber hits hits the road.
So showdown is fantastic because you can search for any and all specific type of devices like web cams
fruiterer's power plants all this kind of stuff.
So if we talk about cyber security or cyber warfare I'm showdown is basically one of those tools that
are used by nation states to find out where those power plants are.
To find out what different types of critical infrastructure are out there now you can use these tools
for positive and negative things.
There's people that use it for pot in positive ways securing themselves.
There's people that use this in a negative way.
So I just want to show you these tools that you know and that you are aware that they're here that they
exist and you should ideally use this to secure your infrastructure because nation states those cyber
warriors that are spying on you on your company they use these tools every day.
And you need to know this so that you can protect yourself against it.
Right.
So here you can basically query the showed and database that will tell you anything and everything you
need to know.
An example here is I wanted to take a look at some of the exploits out on Windows so it'll tell me what
different types of exploits are out there.
It will tell me whether it's from specific people or hacking groups that have authored these different
exposures.
It'll tell me if it's shellcode if it's local attacks web based attacks or web based attacks really
fantastic type of information and you need to know this because this is part of the proactive security
teams tool kit.
And it's also part of the hackers toolkit.
And if you're a government hacker who knows who's reading this or looking at this online training then
you need to know this too because if you're protecting your critical infrastructure this is out there.
This is one of the easiest ways to basically execute sky that attacks and that type of stuff.
So by using showdown you can figure out who's vulnerable and who's online.
And a lot of these power plants a lot of these waterworks a lot of the sewerage plants these things
are online simply because they have to be online for monitoring and management.
And that's a good and a bad thing.
So understand this is out there know how to use it understand it and protect yourself.
So there's another Web site out there that's also really cool for open source Intel.
And it's actually called recorded future.
Now here in this example since Ukraine is very popular right now there's a war going on between the
Ukraine and Russia.
And this thing is really quickly getting out of hand.
I believe yesterday and it's the 22nd on the 21st of January.
There were reports circulating about done a test airport.
There was a battle going on between Russia and Ukraine.
And for instance I want to find out what types of protests are going on in Europe.
And I want to find out what these protests are about.
So if you take a look here.
We basically have Kiev.
I want to take a look at what protests are going on.
And right now I can take a look at.
On the 22nd there was a protest going on basically or is a protest going on and it's about you know
specific things about the European Union.
Kiev wants to join the EU.
They want to be more secure.
They want to have more business stuff like that.
So it's interesting from a political point of view it's interesting from an espionage point of view.
It's interesting from a diplomatic point of view no that these Web sites are out there use them to advantage.
The more that you know about open source intelligence the better it is for you the better you can protect
yourself your infrastructure your family your loved ones your nation and also you can basically protect
yourself by knowing that these tools are out there and you can do your job protecting critical infrastructure.
So these are just some references now.
I love passing on my knowledge and the things that I found were helpful.
And I think one of the most helpful Web sites that you can ever visit and there's such a breath of information
is basically the WTO everyday read up on Stracke dot com slash forward slash OS I I.A. for Slash.
This is one of the best starting points.
And I learned this from folks in the lawful interception industry in the open source intelligence industry
very cool folks very ethical they helped me out and I'm spreading this knowledge and giving you these
skills so that you're aware of what's out there.
Be aware of what's going on.
Protect yourselves protect your family your nations etc..
So if you have any questions about these tools in more detail I can gladly do single.