Today, the social media has become an important part of our life that cannot be ignored. For getting better information about the present scenario of our world, we need to work through different social media like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook. Here is the list of Best Osint Tools for Social Media that includes Seo Crawler for Twitter, Face API for Facebook API Analytics, etc.
Social media has become a vital part of our lives. What used to be a platform for people to connect, share information and communicate with one another, has now become a venue for companies to sell products and services. There are a plethora of tools available for social media management, but which ones are the Best Osint Tools? Osint is a data analysis and visualization tool that can be used for social media monitoring. Osint tools can help identify trends, identify targets, and track conversations on social media platforms. Some of the best osint tools for social media include Hootsuite, SumoMe, and Sprout Social. In this post, we have shared our perspective regarding the Best Osint Tools that you must try.
List of best free osint tools:
3. WolframAlpha
4. WolframAlpha
5. Maltego
6. Spiderfoot
7. BuiltWith
8. Facebook
9. Buffer
academia.edu
This is a platform used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field. Academia.edu currently has over 22million papers and over 144million registered users on their platform.
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library of Congress is the national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States, and the largest library in the world by number of items. The Library’s collections are unique in both scope and depth, spanning over two million items. The Library participates in development of online resources and tools, including America Online, Google Books, and YouTube.
WolframAlpha
WolframAlpha is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from externally sourced “curated data”, unlike a search engine that provides a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer the searcher is looking for. WolframAlpha is a computational knowledge engine that can answer a wide range of questions. It’s powered by large data sets from a variety of sources, including Wikipedia and Google Search.WolframAlpha can help you find information on anything from the meaning of ancient myths to the chemical composition of different materials. You can also use it to explore complex mathematical concepts and to develop new ideas. WolframAlpha is free to use, and it’s available on both desktop and mobile devices. You can even try it out with simple questions before investing in a more comprehensive subscription.
Maltego
Maltego specializes in uncovering relationships among people, companies, domains and publicly accessible information on the internet. It’s also known for taking the sometimes enormous amount of discovered information and plotting it all out in easy-to-read charts and graphs. The graphs do a good job of taking raw intelligence and making it actionable, and each graph can have up to 10,000 data points.
The Maltego program works by automating the searching of different public data sources, so users can click on one button and execute multiple queries. A search plan is called a “transform action” by the program, and Maltego comes with quite a few by default that include common sources of public information like DNS records, whois records, search engines and social networks. Because the program is using public interfaces to perform its searching, it’s compatible with almost any source of information that has a public interface, so adding more searches to a transform action or making up a whole new one is easily possible.
Once the information is gathered, Maltego makes connections that can unmask the hidden relationships between names, email addresses, aliases, companies, websites, document owners, affiliations and other information that might prove useful in an investigation, or to look for potential future problems. The program itself runs in Java, so it works with Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.
There is a free version of the program with limited features called Maltego CE. Desktop versions of Maltego XL run $1,999 per instance. Server installations for large-scale commercial use start at $40,000 and come with a complete training program.
Spiderfoot
Spiderfoot is a free OSINT reconnaissance tool that integrates with multiple data sources to gather and analyze IP addresses, CIDR ranges, domains and subdomains, ASNs, email addresses, phone numbers, names and usernames, BTC addresses, etc. Available on GitHub, Spiderfoot comes with both a command-line interface and an embedded web-server for providing an intuitive web-based GUI.
The application itself comes with over 200 modules making it ideal for red teaming reconnaissance activities, to discover more information about your target or identify what you or your organisation may be inadvertently exposing on the internet.
This package contains an open source intelligence (OSINT) automation tool. Its goal is to automate the process of gathering intelligence about a given target, which may be an IP address, domain name, hostname, network subnet, ASN, e-mail address or person’s name.
SpiderFoot can be used offensively, i.e. as part of a black-box penetration test to gather information about the target, or defensively to identify what information you or your organization are freely providing for attackers to use against you. SpiderFoot is an open-source automation tool use for intelligence gathering(footprinting). The main goal of the tools is to provide fully automated framework for gathering intelligence about a given target(IP address, hostname, domain name). Tool is both available for Windows and Linux operating systems. It is written in python(2.7) and provides web-based GUI for pentester for easy use. Tool can be used as both offensively(ex: black box testing) and defensively(ex: identifying which information is available to the attackers) according to the pentester’s requirements
BuiltWith
As the name implies, BuiltWith lets you find what popular websites are built with. Different tech stacks and platforms power different sites. BuiltWith can, for example, detect whether a website is using WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal as its CMS and provide further details.
BuiltWith also generates a neat list of known JavaScript/CSS libraries (e.g., jQuery or Bootstrap) that a website uses. Further, the service provides a list of plugins installed on the websites, frameworks, server information, analytics and tracking information, etc. BuiltWith can be used for reconnaissance purposes.
What’s more? Combine BuiltWith with website security scanners like WPScan that, for example, integrate with WordPress Vulnerability Database API to spot common security vulnerabilities impacting a website.
For those looking to identify mainly the tech stack makeup of a site, Wappalyzer may be better suited as it provides a more focused, concise output. Try both BuiltWith and Wappalyzer for yourself and see which suits your needs better.
Facebook is the most popular social media platform,it falls under the social networking type and has the largest users base on earth. Facebook was offering an advanced semantic search engine to search within its database by using natural English language phrases and keywords. This semantic search engine called Graph Search and was first introduced in early 2013; it allows Facebook users to type in their queries in the Facebook search box to return accurate results based on their questions/phrases or combined keywords. For example, you can type: Pages liked by ********* replacing the asterisks with the target’s Facebook username, to return a list of pages liked by the specified user.
In 2019, Facebook has removed the Graph search functionality, although, users are still able to utilize Graph search, however, they need to build their graph search queries manually.
After removing its direct support to Graph search, Facebook has improved its search functionitly makng it more accurate, it also adds many filters (see Figure 1) to refine your search as neccessary. Keep in mind you should login to your Facebook account first to use the search options.
Figure 1: Using Standard Facebook Keyword search, notice the number of filters to refine your returned results
There are several online services for searching Facebook without creating customized search queries, the following list the most popular one:
- Facebook Graph Searcher from Intelligence X (https://intelx.io/tools?tab=facebook): You can search for posts from a specific date or month, post from a specific user posting about something, you can also search for posts posted by unknown users which is beneficial for online investigations (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Searching Facebook using Intelligence X
2. Sowdust (https://sowdust.github.io/fb-search): This is another online tool to show how the current Facebook search function works, you can search for posts from a specific user/page, restrict to posts published in group or restricting it to specific location. You can filter by Start/End date and Keyword. Other search options include searching for photos, pages, places among others (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Sowdust interface to search Facebook
- SearchBook (https://github.com/sowdust/searchbook): This is a Firefox add-on (a version is also available for Chrome browser) for executing some Graph-like searches against Facebook. The Add-on functionality is based on the research article Facebook graph search workaround published by Social Links (https://mtg-bi.com/blog/tpost/aiaxk4xl4d-facebook-graph-search-workaround). I tested this extension under Firefox, however, it broke many times during usage.
Legal notice! Using customized code to manipulate Facebook search queries might be against Facebook Terms of Service and even against the law in many countries, so be careful with this regard.
Buffer
Buffer is another great tool for managing all your social media accounts in one place. You can easily add new posts to your queue, schedule them to posts later, and see how many people have already seen them. This is great for keeping your tweets flowing without having to keep on top of them manually.
Buffer (also known as “Bufferapp”) is a multi-purpose social media marketing software tool. Buffer’s core feature is the ability to draft and schedule posts for sharing across multiple social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Buffer also offers social media reporting and monitoring functionality.
Features of Buffer
Posting Schedule
The original Buffer only allowed you to schedule individual tweets in advance on-by-one.
One new-ish feature inside of Buffer’s Publish is the “queue” system for semi-automatically scheduling posts.
With this feature, you can tell Buffer which days and times you’d like it to share future content.
Then, as you add content for Buffer to share, it will automatically put it into the next available time slot.
This way, you can keep sharing across all your social accounts without thinking about when to publish each individual post. Super helpful.
Tailored Posts Composer
Buffer Publish also lets you customize your posts for each social network by clicking “Customize for each network.”
This will allow you to change the text as well as the link and media for each platform
The Buffer Browser Extension
Another great Publish feature is Buffer’s browser extension.
(It’s available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.)
The browser extension allows you to compose new posts from any webpage instead of having to go back to the Buffer site to share something.
You can even customize the post for different social networks like usual, right from the browser extension.
This pairs perfectly with the queue system: see something cool your followers might like? Just add it to your queue, right there from that page.
This makes it very easy to stay active on social media without interrupting your workflow or browsing habits.
The Buffer browser extension also makes it easy to share quotes from articles. Just highlight the text on the page, then right-click and hit “Buffer Selected Text” to start drafting a new post with that text already added in quotes.
Buffer Analyitics
Both Publishing and Engagement come with limited reporting, so not everyone needs Buffer Analytics.
But if social media marketing is super important for your business, Analytics allows you to go much deeper.
It allows you to see data like:
- What kinds of content is performing best
- What your best-performing days are for posting
- Hashtag performance
- Breakdown table of all your published posts, filterable and sortable by a variety of metrics
Conclusion
A comprehensive list of free OSINT tools to help you discover and extract information from social media websites. Our selection is ranked in terms of reliability, scope, and cost. If your goal is to build social-media based OSINT tools into your existing solutions or develop new ones, this post will help you get started.