OSINT stands for “open source intelligence”, which refers to any legally gathered information from free, public sources about an individual or organization. OSINT is used in various fields such as national security, law enforcement, and business intelligence.
OSINT has numerous benefits:. Firstly, it cost-effective compared to traditional information collecting tools.
From an operational standpoint, it strengthens the digital security of public and private organizations by providing threat intelligence, incident response, forensics, and vulnerability assessment.
And of course, through public facing assets it can prove relevant information from outside the organization.
OSINT can also be used for cybersecurity in various ways, such as:
- Identifying potential network vulnerabilities, such as unsecured IoT devices, unpatched software, or misconfigured servers.
- Finding compromised and breached credentials, such as passwords, email addresses, or usernames.
- Gathering personal and background information about individuals or organizations that might pose a threat or a target.
- Monitoring cybercriminal trends and activities on the dark web, social media, blogs, news, etc.
- Using OSINT tools to collect and analyze data from various public sources such as search engines, databases, archives, geolocation services, etc
From The Shadows Emerges Knowledge