Description

Book Synopsis


Table of Contents

Prologue xxv

Chapter 1 Getting Started 1

Why This Book is Different 2

What You Will and Won’t Find in This Book 2

Getting to Know Your Fellow Experts 3

A Note on Cryptocurrencies 4

What You Need to Know 4

Paid Tools and Historical Data 5

What about Maltego? 5

Prerequisites 5

Know How to Use and Configure Linux 5

Get Your API Keys in Order 6

Important Resources 6

OSINT Framework 6

OSINT.link 6

IntelTechniques 7

Termbin 8

Hunchly 9

Wordlists and Generators 9

SecLists 9

Cewl 10

Crunch 10

Proxies 10

Storm Proxies (Auto-Rotating) 10

Cryptocurrencies 101 11

How Do Cryptocurrencies Work? 12

Blockchain Explorers 13

Following the Money 15

Identifying Exchanges and Traders 17

Summary 18

Chapter 2 Investigations and Threat Actors 19

The Path of an Investigator 19

Go Big or Go Home 20

The Breach That Never Happened 21

What Would You Do? 22

Moral Gray Areas 24

Different Investigative Paths 25

Investigating Cyber Criminals 26

The Beginning of the Hunt (for TDO) 27

The Dark Overlord 27

List of Victims 28

A Brief Overview 29

Communication Style 30

Group Structure and Members 30

Cyper 31

Arnie 32

Cr00k (Ping) 35

NSA (Peace of Mind) 36

The Dark Overlord 38

Summary 41

Part I Network Exploration 43

Chapter 3 Manual Network Exploration 45

Chapter Targets: Pepsi.com and Cyper.org 46

Asset Discovery 46

ARIN Search 47

Search Engine Dorks 48

DNSDumpster 49

Hacker Target 52

Shodan 53

Censys (Subdomain Finder) 56

Censys Subdomain Finder 56

Fierce 57

Sublist3r 58

Enumall 59

Results 60

Phishing Domains and Typosquatting 61

Summary 64

Chapter 4 Looking for Network Activity (Advanced NMAP Techniques) 67

Getting Started 67

Preparing a List of Active Hosts 68

Full Port Scans Using Different Scan Types 68

TCP Window Scan 70

Working against Firewalls and IDS 70

Using Reason Response 71

Identifying Live Servers 71

Firewall Evasion 73

Distributed Scanning with Proxies and TOR 73

Fragmented Packets/MTU 74

Service Detection Trick 74

Low and Slow 76

Bad Checksums, Decoy, and Random Data 76

Firewalking 79

Comparing Results 79

Styling NMAP Reports 81

Summary 82

Chapter 5 Automated Tools for Network Discovery 83

SpiderFoot 84

SpiderFoot HX (Premium) 91

Intrigue.io 95

Entities Tab 96

Analyzing uberpeople.net 99

Analyzing the Results 104

Exporting Your Results 105

Recon-NG 107

Searching for Modules 111

Using Modules 111

Looking for Ports with Shodan 115

Summary 116

Part II Web Exploration 119

Chapter 6 Website Information Gathering 121

BuiltWith 121

Finding Common Sites Using Google Analytics Tracker 123

IP History and Related Sites 124

Webapp Information Gatherer (WIG) 124

CMSMap 129

Running a Single Site Scan 130

Scanning Multiple Sites in Batch Mode 130

Detecting Vulnerabilities 131

WPScan 132

Dealing with WAFs/WordPress Not Detected 136

Summary 141

Chapter 7 Directory Hunting 143

Dirhunt 143

Wfuzz 146

Photon 149

Crawling a Website 151

Intrigue.io 152

Summary 157

Chapter 8 Search Engine Dorks 159

Essential Search Dorks 160

The Minus Sign 160

Using Quotes 160

The site: Operator 161

The intitle: Operator 161

The allintitle: Operator 162

The fi letype: Operator 162

The inurl: Operator 163

The cache: Operator 165

The allinurl: Operator 165

The fi lename: Operator 165

The intext: Operator 165

The Power of the Dork 166

Don’t Forget about Bing and Yahoo! 169

Automated Dorking Tools 169

Inurlbr 169

Using Inurlbr 171

Summary 173

Chapter 9 WHOIS 175

WHOIS 175

Uses for WHOIS Data 176

Historical WHOIS 177

Searching for Similar Domains 177

Namedroppers.com 177

Searching for Multiple Keywords 179

Advanced Searches 181

Looking for Threat Actors 182

Whoisology 183

Advanced Domain Searching 187

Worth the Money? Absolutely 188

DomainTools 188

Domain Search 188

Bulk WHOIS 189

Reverse IP Lookup 189

WHOIS Records on Steroids 190

WHOIS History 192

The Power of Screenshots 193

Digging into WHOIS History 193

Looking for Changes in Ownership 194

Reverse WHOIS 196

Cross-Checking All Information 197

Summary 199

Chapter 10 Certificate Transparency and Internet Archives 201

Certificate Transparency 201

What Does Any of This Have to Do with Digital Investigations? 202

Scouting with CTFR 202

Crt.sh 204

CT in Action: Side-stepping Cloudflare 204

Testing More Targets 208

CloudFlair (Script) and Censys 209

How Does It Work? 210

Wayback Machine and Search Engine Archives 211

Search Engine Caches 212

CachedView.com 214

Wayback Machine Scraper 214

Enum Wayback 215

Scraping Wayback with Photon 216

Archive.org Site Search URLs 217

Wayback Site Digest: A List of Every Site URL Cached by Wayback 219

Summary 220

Chapter 11 Iris by DomainTools 221

The Basics of Iris 221

Guided Pivots 223

Configuring Your Settings 223

Historical Search Setting 224

Pivootttt!!! 225

Pivoting on SSL Certificate Hashes 227

Keeping Notes 228

WHOIS History 230

Screenshot History 232

Hosting History 232

Bringing It All Together 234

A Major Find 240

Summary 241

Part III Digging for Gold 243

Chapter 12 Document Metadata 245

Exiftool 246

Metagoofil 248

Recon-NG Metadata Modules 250

Metacrawler 250

Interesting_Files Module 252

Pushpin Geolocation Modules 254

Intrigue.io 257

FOCA 261

Starting a Project 262

Extracting Metadata 263

Summary 266

Chapter 13 Interesting Places to Look 267

TheHarvester 268

Running a Scan 269

Paste Sites 273

Psbdmp.ws 273

Forums 274

Investigating Forum History (and TDO) 275

Following Breadcrumbs 276

Tracing Cyper’s Identity 278

Code Repositories 280

SearchCode.com 281

Searching for Code 282

False Negatives 283

Gitrob 284

Git Commit Logs 287

Wiki Sites 288

Wikipedia 289

Summary 292

Chapter 14 Publicly Accessible Data Storage 293

The Exactis Leak and Shodan 294

Data Attribution 295

Shodan’s Command-Line Options 296

Querying Historical Data 296

CloudStorageFinder 298

Amazon S3 299

Digital Ocean Spaces 300

NoSQL Databases 301

MongoDB 302

Robot 3T 302

Mongo Command-Line Tools 305

Elasticsearch 308

Querying Elasticsearch 308

Dumping Elasticsearch Data 311

NoScrape 311

MongoDB 313

Elasticsearch 314

Scan 314

Search 315

Dump 317

MatchDump 317

Cassandra 318

Amazon S3 320

Using Your Own S3 Credentials 320

Summary 321

Part IV People Hunting 323

Chapter 15 Researching People, Images, and Locations 325

PIPL 326

Searching for People 327

Public Records and Background Checks 330

Ancestry.com 331

Threat Actors Have Dads, Too 332

Criminal Record Searches 332

Image Searching 333

Google Images 334

Searching for Gold 335

Following the Trail 335

TinEye 336

EagleEye 340

Searching for Images 340

Cree.py and Geolocation 343

Getting Started 343

IP Address Tracking 346

Summary 347

Chapter 16 Searching Social Media 349

OSINT.rest 350

Another Test Subject 355

Twitter 357

SocialLinks: For Maltego Users 358

Skiptracer 361

Running a Search 361

Searching for an Email Address 361

Searching for a Phone Number 364

Searching Usernames 366

One More Username Search 368

Userrecon 370

Reddit Investigator 372

A Critical “Peace” of the TDO Investigation 374

Summary 375

Chapter 17 Profile Tracking and Password Reset Clues 377

Where to Start (with TDO)? 377

Building a Profile Matrix 378

Starting a Search with Forums 379

Ban Lists 381

Social Engineering 381

SE’ing Threat Actors: The “Argon” Story 383

Everyone Gets SE’d—a Lesson Learned 387

The End of TDO and the KickAss Forum 388

Using Password Reset Clues 390

Starting Your Verification Sheet 391

Gmail 391

Facebook 393

PayPal 394

Twitter 397

Microsoft 399

Instagram 400

Using jQuery Website Responses 400

ICQ 403

Summary 405

Chapter 18 Passwords, Dumps, and Data Viper 407

Using Passwords 408

Completing F3ttywap’s Profile Matrix 409

An Important Wrong Turn 412

Acquiring Your Data 413

Data Quality and Collections 1–5 413

Always Manually Verify the Data 415

Where to Find Quality Data 420

Data Viper 420

Forums: The Missing Link 421

Identifying the Real “Cr00k” 422

Tracking Cr00k’s Forum Movements 423

Timeline Analysis 423

The Eureka Moment 427

Vanity over OPSEC, Every Time 429

Why This Connection is Significant 429

Starting Small: Data Viper 1.0 430

Summary 431

Chapter 19 Interacting with Threat Actors 433

Drawing Them Out of the Shadows 433

Who is WhitePacket? 434

The Bev Robb Connection 435

Stradinatras 436

Obfuscation and TDO 437

Who is Bill? 439

So Who Exactly is Bill? 440

YoungBugsThug 440

How Did I Know It Was Chris? 441

A Connection to Mirai Botnet? 442

Why Was This Discovery So Earth-Shattering? 444

Question Everything! 445

Establishing a Flow of Information 446

Leveraging Hacker Drama 447

Was Any of That Real? 448

Looking for Other Clues 449

Bringing It Back to TDO 450

Resolving One Final Question 451

Withdrawing Bitcoin 451

Summary 452

Chapter 20 Cutting through the Disinformation of a 10-Million-Dollar Hack 453

GnosticPlayers 454

Sites Hacked by GnosticPlayers 456

Gnostic’s Hacking Techniques 457

GnosticPlayers’ Posts 459

GnosticPlayers2 Emerges 461

A Mysterious Third Member 462

NSFW/Photon 463

The Gloves Come Off 464

Making Contact 465

Gabriel/Bildstein aka Kuroi’sh 465

Contacting His Friends 467

Weeding through Disinformation 468

Verifying with Wayback 468

Bringing It All Together 469

Data Viper 469

Trust but Verify 472

Domain Tools’ Iris 474

Verifying with a Second Data Source 475

The End of the Line 476

What Really Happened? 476

Outofreach 476

Kuroi’sh Magically Appears 477

What I Learned from Watching Lost 477

Who Hacked GateHub? 478

Unraveling the Lie 479

Was Gabriel Involved? My Theory 479

Gabriel is Nclay: An Alternate Theory 479

All roads lead back to NSFW 480

Summary 481

Epilogue 483

Index 487

Hunting Cyber Criminals

    Product form

    £26.40

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    Order before 4pm today for delivery by Fri 19 Jun 2026.

    A Paperback / softback by Vinny Troia

    1 in stock

      Trusted by thousands of customers. See 2,385+ Customer Reviews

      View other formats and editions of Hunting Cyber Criminals by Vinny Troia

      Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc
      Publication Date: 19/03/2020
      ISBN13: 9781119540922, 978-1119540922
      ISBN10: 1119540925

      Description

      Book Synopsis


      Table of Contents

      Prologue xxv

      Chapter 1 Getting Started 1

      Why This Book is Different 2

      What You Will and Won’t Find in This Book 2

      Getting to Know Your Fellow Experts 3

      A Note on Cryptocurrencies 4

      What You Need to Know 4

      Paid Tools and Historical Data 5

      What about Maltego? 5

      Prerequisites 5

      Know How to Use and Configure Linux 5

      Get Your API Keys in Order 6

      Important Resources 6

      OSINT Framework 6

      OSINT.link 6

      IntelTechniques 7

      Termbin 8

      Hunchly 9

      Wordlists and Generators 9

      SecLists 9

      Cewl 10

      Crunch 10

      Proxies 10

      Storm Proxies (Auto-Rotating) 10

      Cryptocurrencies 101 11

      How Do Cryptocurrencies Work? 12

      Blockchain Explorers 13

      Following the Money 15

      Identifying Exchanges and Traders 17

      Summary 18

      Chapter 2 Investigations and Threat Actors 19

      The Path of an Investigator 19

      Go Big or Go Home 20

      The Breach That Never Happened 21

      What Would You Do? 22

      Moral Gray Areas 24

      Different Investigative Paths 25

      Investigating Cyber Criminals 26

      The Beginning of the Hunt (for TDO) 27

      The Dark Overlord 27

      List of Victims 28

      A Brief Overview 29

      Communication Style 30

      Group Structure and Members 30

      Cyper 31

      Arnie 32

      Cr00k (Ping) 35

      NSA (Peace of Mind) 36

      The Dark Overlord 38

      Summary 41

      Part I Network Exploration 43

      Chapter 3 Manual Network Exploration 45

      Chapter Targets: Pepsi.com and Cyper.org 46

      Asset Discovery 46

      ARIN Search 47

      Search Engine Dorks 48

      DNSDumpster 49

      Hacker Target 52

      Shodan 53

      Censys (Subdomain Finder) 56

      Censys Subdomain Finder 56

      Fierce 57

      Sublist3r 58

      Enumall 59

      Results 60

      Phishing Domains and Typosquatting 61

      Summary 64

      Chapter 4 Looking for Network Activity (Advanced NMAP Techniques) 67

      Getting Started 67

      Preparing a List of Active Hosts 68

      Full Port Scans Using Different Scan Types 68

      TCP Window Scan 70

      Working against Firewalls and IDS 70

      Using Reason Response 71

      Identifying Live Servers 71

      Firewall Evasion 73

      Distributed Scanning with Proxies and TOR 73

      Fragmented Packets/MTU 74

      Service Detection Trick 74

      Low and Slow 76

      Bad Checksums, Decoy, and Random Data 76

      Firewalking 79

      Comparing Results 79

      Styling NMAP Reports 81

      Summary 82

      Chapter 5 Automated Tools for Network Discovery 83

      SpiderFoot 84

      SpiderFoot HX (Premium) 91

      Intrigue.io 95

      Entities Tab 96

      Analyzing uberpeople.net 99

      Analyzing the Results 104

      Exporting Your Results 105

      Recon-NG 107

      Searching for Modules 111

      Using Modules 111

      Looking for Ports with Shodan 115

      Summary 116

      Part II Web Exploration 119

      Chapter 6 Website Information Gathering 121

      BuiltWith 121

      Finding Common Sites Using Google Analytics Tracker 123

      IP History and Related Sites 124

      Webapp Information Gatherer (WIG) 124

      CMSMap 129

      Running a Single Site Scan 130

      Scanning Multiple Sites in Batch Mode 130

      Detecting Vulnerabilities 131

      WPScan 132

      Dealing with WAFs/WordPress Not Detected 136

      Summary 141

      Chapter 7 Directory Hunting 143

      Dirhunt 143

      Wfuzz 146

      Photon 149

      Crawling a Website 151

      Intrigue.io 152

      Summary 157

      Chapter 8 Search Engine Dorks 159

      Essential Search Dorks 160

      The Minus Sign 160

      Using Quotes 160

      The site: Operator 161

      The intitle: Operator 161

      The allintitle: Operator 162

      The fi letype: Operator 162

      The inurl: Operator 163

      The cache: Operator 165

      The allinurl: Operator 165

      The fi lename: Operator 165

      The intext: Operator 165

      The Power of the Dork 166

      Don’t Forget about Bing and Yahoo! 169

      Automated Dorking Tools 169

      Inurlbr 169

      Using Inurlbr 171

      Summary 173

      Chapter 9 WHOIS 175

      WHOIS 175

      Uses for WHOIS Data 176

      Historical WHOIS 177

      Searching for Similar Domains 177

      Namedroppers.com 177

      Searching for Multiple Keywords 179

      Advanced Searches 181

      Looking for Threat Actors 182

      Whoisology 183

      Advanced Domain Searching 187

      Worth the Money? Absolutely 188

      DomainTools 188

      Domain Search 188

      Bulk WHOIS 189

      Reverse IP Lookup 189

      WHOIS Records on Steroids 190

      WHOIS History 192

      The Power of Screenshots 193

      Digging into WHOIS History 193

      Looking for Changes in Ownership 194

      Reverse WHOIS 196

      Cross-Checking All Information 197

      Summary 199

      Chapter 10 Certificate Transparency and Internet Archives 201

      Certificate Transparency 201

      What Does Any of This Have to Do with Digital Investigations? 202

      Scouting with CTFR 202

      Crt.sh 204

      CT in Action: Side-stepping Cloudflare 204

      Testing More Targets 208

      CloudFlair (Script) and Censys 209

      How Does It Work? 210

      Wayback Machine and Search Engine Archives 211

      Search Engine Caches 212

      CachedView.com 214

      Wayback Machine Scraper 214

      Enum Wayback 215

      Scraping Wayback with Photon 216

      Archive.org Site Search URLs 217

      Wayback Site Digest: A List of Every Site URL Cached by Wayback 219

      Summary 220

      Chapter 11 Iris by DomainTools 221

      The Basics of Iris 221

      Guided Pivots 223

      Configuring Your Settings 223

      Historical Search Setting 224

      Pivootttt!!! 225

      Pivoting on SSL Certificate Hashes 227

      Keeping Notes 228

      WHOIS History 230

      Screenshot History 232

      Hosting History 232

      Bringing It All Together 234

      A Major Find 240

      Summary 241

      Part III Digging for Gold 243

      Chapter 12 Document Metadata 245

      Exiftool 246

      Metagoofil 248

      Recon-NG Metadata Modules 250

      Metacrawler 250

      Interesting_Files Module 252

      Pushpin Geolocation Modules 254

      Intrigue.io 257

      FOCA 261

      Starting a Project 262

      Extracting Metadata 263

      Summary 266

      Chapter 13 Interesting Places to Look 267

      TheHarvester 268

      Running a Scan 269

      Paste Sites 273

      Psbdmp.ws 273

      Forums 274

      Investigating Forum History (and TDO) 275

      Following Breadcrumbs 276

      Tracing Cyper’s Identity 278

      Code Repositories 280

      SearchCode.com 281

      Searching for Code 282

      False Negatives 283

      Gitrob 284

      Git Commit Logs 287

      Wiki Sites 288

      Wikipedia 289

      Summary 292

      Chapter 14 Publicly Accessible Data Storage 293

      The Exactis Leak and Shodan 294

      Data Attribution 295

      Shodan’s Command-Line Options 296

      Querying Historical Data 296

      CloudStorageFinder 298

      Amazon S3 299

      Digital Ocean Spaces 300

      NoSQL Databases 301

      MongoDB 302

      Robot 3T 302

      Mongo Command-Line Tools 305

      Elasticsearch 308

      Querying Elasticsearch 308

      Dumping Elasticsearch Data 311

      NoScrape 311

      MongoDB 313

      Elasticsearch 314

      Scan 314

      Search 315

      Dump 317

      MatchDump 317

      Cassandra 318

      Amazon S3 320

      Using Your Own S3 Credentials 320

      Summary 321

      Part IV People Hunting 323

      Chapter 15 Researching People, Images, and Locations 325

      PIPL 326

      Searching for People 327

      Public Records and Background Checks 330

      Ancestry.com 331

      Threat Actors Have Dads, Too 332

      Criminal Record Searches 332

      Image Searching 333

      Google Images 334

      Searching for Gold 335

      Following the Trail 335

      TinEye 336

      EagleEye 340

      Searching for Images 340

      Cree.py and Geolocation 343

      Getting Started 343

      IP Address Tracking 346

      Summary 347

      Chapter 16 Searching Social Media 349

      OSINT.rest 350

      Another Test Subject 355

      Twitter 357

      SocialLinks: For Maltego Users 358

      Skiptracer 361

      Running a Search 361

      Searching for an Email Address 361

      Searching for a Phone Number 364

      Searching Usernames 366

      One More Username Search 368

      Userrecon 370

      Reddit Investigator 372

      A Critical “Peace” of the TDO Investigation 374

      Summary 375

      Chapter 17 Profile Tracking and Password Reset Clues 377

      Where to Start (with TDO)? 377

      Building a Profile Matrix 378

      Starting a Search with Forums 379

      Ban Lists 381

      Social Engineering 381

      SE’ing Threat Actors: The “Argon” Story 383

      Everyone Gets SE’d—a Lesson Learned 387

      The End of TDO and the KickAss Forum 388

      Using Password Reset Clues 390

      Starting Your Verification Sheet 391

      Gmail 391

      Facebook 393

      PayPal 394

      Twitter 397

      Microsoft 399

      Instagram 400

      Using jQuery Website Responses 400

      ICQ 403

      Summary 405

      Chapter 18 Passwords, Dumps, and Data Viper 407

      Using Passwords 408

      Completing F3ttywap’s Profile Matrix 409

      An Important Wrong Turn 412

      Acquiring Your Data 413

      Data Quality and Collections 1–5 413

      Always Manually Verify the Data 415

      Where to Find Quality Data 420

      Data Viper 420

      Forums: The Missing Link 421

      Identifying the Real “Cr00k” 422

      Tracking Cr00k’s Forum Movements 423

      Timeline Analysis 423

      The Eureka Moment 427

      Vanity over OPSEC, Every Time 429

      Why This Connection is Significant 429

      Starting Small: Data Viper 1.0 430

      Summary 431

      Chapter 19 Interacting with Threat Actors 433

      Drawing Them Out of the Shadows 433

      Who is WhitePacket? 434

      The Bev Robb Connection 435

      Stradinatras 436

      Obfuscation and TDO 437

      Who is Bill? 439

      So Who Exactly is Bill? 440

      YoungBugsThug 440

      How Did I Know It Was Chris? 441

      A Connection to Mirai Botnet? 442

      Why Was This Discovery So Earth-Shattering? 444

      Question Everything! 445

      Establishing a Flow of Information 446

      Leveraging Hacker Drama 447

      Was Any of That Real? 448

      Looking for Other Clues 449

      Bringing It Back to TDO 450

      Resolving One Final Question 451

      Withdrawing Bitcoin 451

      Summary 452

      Chapter 20 Cutting through the Disinformation of a 10-Million-Dollar Hack 453

      GnosticPlayers 454

      Sites Hacked by GnosticPlayers 456

      Gnostic’s Hacking Techniques 457

      GnosticPlayers’ Posts 459

      GnosticPlayers2 Emerges 461

      A Mysterious Third Member 462

      NSFW/Photon 463

      The Gloves Come Off 464

      Making Contact 465

      Gabriel/Bildstein aka Kuroi’sh 465

      Contacting His Friends 467

      Weeding through Disinformation 468

      Verifying with Wayback 468

      Bringing It All Together 469

      Data Viper 469

      Trust but Verify 472

      Domain Tools’ Iris 474

      Verifying with a Second Data Source 475

      The End of the Line 476

      What Really Happened? 476

      Outofreach 476

      Kuroi’sh Magically Appears 477

      What I Learned from Watching Lost 477

      Who Hacked GateHub? 478

      Unraveling the Lie 479

      Was Gabriel Involved? My Theory 479

      Gabriel is Nclay: An Alternate Theory 479

      All roads lead back to NSFW 480

      Summary 481

      Epilogue 483

      Index 487

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