Footprinting and Reconnaissance - Location Information and People Search

In last article, I mentioned the steps to determine the Operating System of the target. And here, we are going to study about determine the geographic location of the target, as well as using online people search services.

So. first you might think 'Why determining the location in important in Hacking?'. It holds a lot importance as many things can be determined from the location of a company. A few of them are listed below :-

• Services provided by the company.
• Nature of the society at that place.
• Mindset of workers (people residing there).
• And many more...

Now, but might think 'What is the importance of all the above mentioned things!'. Basically, these all things comes into light when we perform social engineering attacks (will be taught in later articles) on the target company.

 

Tools for finding geographical location :-

• Google Maps - https://maps.google.com
• Wikimapia - http://www.wikimapia.org 
• National Geographic Maps - http://maps.nationalgeographic.com 
• Bing Maps - https://www.bing.com/maps 

 

But only knowing the geographic location doesn't help you to perform social attacks. Many other information is needed to perform such attacks. From the list of information needed, only two information gathering tricks are mentioned here. One is location information (mentioned above) and other is People Search (see below).

Social networking sites are the great source of personal and organizational information. Information about an individual can be found at various people search websites. The people search returns the following information about a person or organization :-

• Residential addresses and Email addresses
• Contact numbers and Date-of-Birth
• Photos and Social Networking Profiles
• Blog URLs
• Satellite pictures of Private Residencies 
• Upcoming projects and operating environments.

People Search Online Services :-

• AnyWho - http://www.anywho.com
• US Search - http://www.ussearch.com
• Intelius - http://www.intelius.com
• 411 - http://www.411.com
• PeopleFinders - http://www.peoplefinders.com
• PeopleSmart - http://peoplesmart.com
• Veromi - http://www.veromi.net
• PrivateEye - http://www.privateeye.com
• People Search Now - http://www.peoplesearchnow.com
• Public Background Checks - http://www.publicbackgroundchecks.com

NOTE :- These services are mostly for US people. That means, you can only find the data of citizens of US and not other countries. I am still finding such server for other countries database. Till then enjoy with this.

 

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