Why Crack When OSINT Will Do?

While the focus of this book is on password cracking – the recovery of plaintext credentials given their scrambled and unreadable (be it hashed, encrypted, or otherwise) content – we do face challenges along the way. In some cases, password-scrambling algorithms may be too time consuming to recover plain text from, and in others we may exhaust our possible guesses and still not discover a password.

In these situations, there may be an easier alternative – leveraging our known public resources to determine more about the subject, and use this to either discover previously used passwords, or gain information about potential passwords our client or target might use for future password-cracking operations. The use of publicly available sources for information gathering is also known as Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT, and we will leverage these sources to try and simplify our work.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover...