WebScraping & OSINT: A Beginners Guide

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13 Aug 2023

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If you’re new to OSINT or Cybersecurity, it may surprise you at how often web scraping is used.

In today’s piece on OSINT tools, we’ll be exploring web scraping. Web scraping is a powerful tool for collecting and analyzing data from websites. It can be used for various purposes, such as data analysis, research, and automation. We’ll look at the reasons behind web scraping and how it can be used effectively for open source intelligence (OSINT) gathering.

What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the process of collecting and parsing data from websites. It involves sending a request to a website’s server, retrieving the HTML content of the web page, and extracting the desired data from the HTML structure. Web scraping can be done manually, but it is often automated using specialized tools and programming languages such as Python. There’s also automatic web scrapers that map the internet for us, quietly exploring and searching through new machines, pages and systems.

How Does Web Scraping Work?
Web scraping works by using automated tools to send requests to a website’s server and retrieve the HTML content of the web page. The HTML content is then parsed and analyzed to extract the desired data using techniques such as XPath, CSS selectors, or regular expressions. The extracted data is then stored in a structured format, such as a spreadsheet or a database, for further analysis or use in applications.

Best Practices for Web Scraping
When performing web scraping, it is important to follow best practices to ensure ethical and legal use of the data and to avoid any potential issues. Here are some best practices for web scraping:
1. Respect Website Policies: Before scraping a website, review its terms of use and robots.txt file to ensure that scraping is allowed and to avoid scraping restricted or private content.
2. Use Delay and Throttling: Implement delays and throttling mechanisms in your scraping code to avoid overwhelming the website’s server with too many requests in a short period of time.

3. Identify Yourself: Include a user-agent string in your scraping code to identify your scraper and provide contact information in case the website owner needs to reach you.

4. Be Mindful of Copyright and Intellectual Property: Ensure that you are not violating any copyright or intellectual property rights when scraping data from websites.
Censys is a brilliant tool for cyber investigators, with most of the work done for you. Source: Author.

What Tools Can i Use for Experimentation?
Well this bit really depends on your machine, and own individual strengths. If you’re fluent in Python, SCRAPY is a web scraping framework that is able to be customized to your own requirements and is a fast effective way of searching for the information you require.
Scrapy is a web scraping Censys is a brilliant tool for cyber investigators, with most of the work done for you. Source: Author.

If you’re a no coder, or require tools that have little to no code input, then is this case Parse Hub is your friend. Parse Hub will give you the means to quickly and easily scrape for data without requiring much of the custom configuration that you’ll need to apply with other tools.
Parse Hub allows no coders the ability to scrape for data with little to no configuration needed. Source: Parsehub.com

If you’d like to look at the results of webscraping, however have little inclination to configure or use your own tools then that’s okay too! We have a myriad of web scrapers that do the heavy lifting and subsequently make that information available to you. One of the best known source of information is one we’ve regularly given credit to, shodan.io

Shodan uses crawling and scraping to map new devices to the internet, using banner information to build and identify devices of interest. Shodan’s all seeing digital eye provides a vast range of resources to researchers and investigators. Best of all, if you’re a teacher or provide educational services to students you’ll be able to obtain a free enterprise account simply by using you institutional email address.

Another useful tool that provides a no code, all in one service is Censys. Similar to Shodan, Censys uses web crawlers to map and crawl the entire internet. This reveals many useful pieces of information that’s available to the cyber researcher. One advantage of Censys over shodan is the ability to access censysGPT. While it’s currently in beta mode, this is a tool that pairs censys data with a Language Learning Model AI, allowing for streamlined search and super quick trawl’s for data. If you’re interested, head over to censys and give it a try.
Censys GPT is an interesting tool available to analysts. Source: Author

The Final Word:
Web scraping is a powerful tool for collecting and analyzing data from websites. It can be used for various purposes, such as data analysis, research, and automation. When performing web scraping, it is important to follow best practices to ensure ethical and legal use of the data and to avoid any potential issues. It’s also important to understand that laws and regulations around web scraping and OSINT vary from country to country. Ensure you’re aware and on the right side of the law for your location.
Lastly, social media platforms are a valuable source of OSINT, and there are many tools available to help you efficiently gather and analyze data from these platforms. To have best success in conducting open source investigations, we need to understand how we’re able to leverage this information and why we need to do so. OSINT investigations will usually return large pools of data to the investigator. Understanding how to process this data is an essential step in any investigators tool kit.

Remember, when we use web scraping and OSINT tools effectively, we can gain valuable insights and make informed decisions using the best information we have available to us.

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