- [Instructor] Email footprinting
or email reconnaissance can be extremely beneficial
for an attacker because of many different reasons.
As a matter of fact,
I'm actually in front of a tool called Maltego
as you see is a community edition.
There's two versions of Maltego,
the professional version and the community edition,
which is free.
And that's what I'm using right now.
And basically this tool is extremely popular
for penetration testing.
And of course, you know
for open source intelligence or OSINT reconnaissance.
In this case to find very interesting emails
related to any type of company or domain,
for example, I just searched for a domain that I own,
h4cker.org with the number four.
And then you actually immediately were able
to obtain my email address in that domain, Omar@h4cker.org.
So why can this be beneficial for an attacker?
Well, an attacker can use this email
for sending a spear phishing attack or, you know
any phishing type of attack to lure the user
to either click on a malicious link
or follow that link to a malicious website
or click on a malicious attachment
and perhaps install a back door, manipulate the system,
and so on.
Another way that the attacker can leverage this email
is because nowadays we use email addresses like this one
to log into other sites specifically with single sign on,
and you know, things like SAML authentication
and you know, many other implementations.
Now, the attacker can then use this email address
to potentially find login pages
or any type of systems related to h4cker.org.
Let's say that website may have a slash admin account
or area.
Then it may actually use this email address
to perform a brute force attack
or to attempt to, of course, you know, log in
as that user, of course, you know,
taking advantage of other types of vulnerabilities
or, you know, further reconnaissance.
And as I mentioned, a brute force attack.
So many different ways that you can leverage these emails
for spear phishing attacks,
social engineering attacks,
and of course, you know,
to leverage them in other authentication
and authorization attacks as well.