Information gathering from the web can be useful for many situations. Websites can provide a wealth of information. The information can be used to help when performing a social engineering attack or a phishing attack. You can find names and emails for potential targets, or collect keywords and headers that can help to quickly understand the topic or business of a website. You can also potentially learn the location of the business, find images and documents, and analyze other aspects of a website using web scraping techniques.
Learning about the target allows you to create a believable pretext. Pretexting is a common technique attackers use to trick an unsuspecting victim into complying with a request that compromises the user, their account, or their machine in some kind of way. For example, someone researches a company and finds out that it is a large company with...
