Before launching a targeted attack, sophisticated threat actors spend days or weeks gathering intelligence. They're not guessing—they're building detailed profiles of your organization, employees, and infrastructure using publicly available information. This is Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), and it's often the first phase of a breach.
What Attackers Find About Your Organization
A typical OSINT reconnaissance might uncover:
- Employee names and roles: LinkedIn, company website, press releases
- Email formats: firstname.lastname@company.com patterns
- Technology stack: Job postings reveal what tools you use
- Organizational structure: Who reports to whom, who has access
- Vendor relationships: Third parties with potential access
- Physical locations: Office addresses, data center locations
- Recent changes: Mergers, layoffs, new initiatives
The Social Engineering Connection
OSINT enables highly targeted social engineering. With enough reconnaissance, an attacker can craft convincing pretexts:
- Impersonating a vendor your company actually uses
- Referencing real projects or initiatives
- Name-dropping actual employees or executives
- Timing attacks around real events (conferences, quarterly reports)
This is why generic security awareness training fails. Employees are trained to spot obvious phishing, but targeted attacks using real company information bypass these defenses.
Real-World OSINT Findings
During assessments, we regularly discover:
- Credentials exposed in GitHub repositories or paste sites
- Internal documents accidentally shared publicly
- Employee personal information enabling password guessing
- Infrastructure details from DNS records and certificate transparency logs
- Sensitive metadata in published documents (author names, software versions, internal paths)
Reducing Your Attack Surface
You can't eliminate your digital footprint, but you can manage it:
- Audit public information: Know what's out there about your organization
- Limit job posting details: Don't advertise your exact technology stack
- Train employees on social media: Personal posts can reveal corporate information
- Monitor for leaks: Set up alerts for company name mentions on paste sites
- Sanitize documents: Strip metadata before publishing
Our OSINT assessments show you exactly what attackers can learn about your organization—before they use it against you.