Footprinting a Target using OSINT Framework

OSINT Framework is an open source intelligence gathering framework that helps security professionals for performing automated footprinting and reconnaissance, OSINT research, and intelligence gathering. It is focused on gathering information from free tools or resources. This framework includes a simple web interface that lists various OSINT tools arranged by category and is shown as an OSINT tree structure on the web interface.

The OSINT Framework includes the following indicators with the available tools:

• (T) – Indicates a link to a tool that must be installed and run locally
• (D) – Google Dork
• (R) – Requires registration
• (M) – Indicates a URL that contains the search term and the URL itself must be edited manually Here, we will use the OSINT Framework to explore footprinting categories and associated tools. Open any web browser (here, Mozilla Firefox). In the address bar of the browser place your mouse cursor, type https://osintframework.com/ and press Enter.

OSINT Framework website appears; you can observe the OSINT tree on the left side of screen, as shown in the screenshot.

Clicking on any of the categories such as Username, Email Address, or Domain Name will make many useful resources appear on the screen in the form of a sub-tree.

Click the Username category and click to expand the Username Search Engines and Specific Sites sub-categories.

You can observe a list of OSINT tools filtered by sub-categories (Username Search Engines and Specific Sites sub-categories).

From the list of available tools under the Username Search Engines category, click on the NameCheckr tool to navigate to the NameCheckr website

The NameCheckr website appears, as shown in the screenshot.

Similarly, you can explore other available categories such as Email Address, IP Address, Social Networks, Instant Messaging, etc. and the tools associated with each category. Using these tools, you can perform footprinting on the target organization

This concludes the demonstration of performing footprinting using the OSINT Framework.

You can also use footprinting tools such as Recon-Dog (https:// www.github.com), Grecon (https://github.com), Th3Inspector (https:// github.com), Raccoon (https://github.com), Orb (https://github.com), etc. to gather additional information related to the target company.