Introduction[How quickly can hackers find exposed data online? ]
Data is an organization’s most valuable asset. An organization’s data may consist of its financial details, consumer information, NPI, PII information, employee details and more. Protecting employee and consumer data should be a top priority for any organization, as exposing data online could lead to a critical attack and untold damage.A hacker can easily find exposed online data. This can turn into a nightmare, as an organization-focused hacker routinely uses open source intelligence tools to do the job.
In August 2019, LinkedIn suffered a massive data breach exposed online. More than 159 million pieces of data available on Pastebin in the “email
assword” format have been found. All of this is of course available and for .012BTC you can try to access anyone’s LinkedIn user account. If they haven’t changed their password and haven’t used the same password on other sites, you can hack into many of the places where they do their work. You can access their iCloud/Gmail/Yahoo with all their photos, email accounts, Facebook and Instagram – all vulnerable to hacking once you have this database.The dark web
One nefarious way a hacker can find an organization’s exposed data online is on the Dark Web or Deep Web. The Dark Web is web content that exists on darknets, overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configuration, or permissions to access. The Dark Web uses onion routing, which is only accessible via TOR VPN.The best thing about onion routing for hackers is that it is not indexed by Google and is not accessible via the standard internet. A hacker is very aware of onion routing and how to gain access to the dark web. Details of more than 267 million Facebook accounts have been found to be available on the dark web for as little as €500. Data consists of user account details such as names, user IDs and phone numbers. Even if these details do not include passwords and other such credentials, a hacker can use them to impersonate/steale a user’s identity with which they could very realistically carry out a spam and/or phishing attack.
The Dark Web is a protected place to buy/sell such sensitive data on the internet without getting caught because it provides complete anonymity to anyone using it.
Zoosk is a dating app that recently suffered a massive data breach. Hacker group ShinyHunters has put up for sale what it claims is stolen account information of millions of online daters who used the popular app. Nowadays, a hacker with a good understanding of the dark web could easily access this dump and gain access to millions of stolen accounts, while the average internet user might not even know what the dark web is.
OSINT stands for open-source intelligence. The OSINT framework is focused on gathering information from free tools or resources and the intent is to help people find free OSINT resources. Some of the sites included may require registration or offer more data for money, but you should be able to get at least some of the information available for free.
OSINT helps hackers search for available data on specific individuals or organizations that are exposed on the Internet. There are plenty of tools available in the OSINT Framework to accomplish this task. OSINT helps a hacker to get small but very important details about a person/organization such as their office location, current job vacancies, employee working in the office, their names, address, social security number and so on.
In today’s world, more data is available online than ever before. The main difference between a regular internet user and a hacker is that a hacker knows where to look for the most reliable information. Using OSINT techniques, a hacker can obtain the following details about an organization:
- Username
- Email address
- Domain name
- IP address
- Image/video/documents
- Telephone number
- Public records
- Business records
- Forum/Blogs
- Documentation
Google hacking, also called Google dorking, is a hacking technique that uses Google search and other Google applications to find security holes in the configuration and computer code of websites.
In Google dorking, the hacker uses Google’s advanced search capabilities to find only the data type they requested. This shrinks the Google search result to show an unwanted result that may not be very useful to a hacker. For example, if a hacker wants to search a PDF document for a web page that is available on public websites, he will perform the following query to get the desired result: