GI OSINT
GI OSINT stands for Geographic Intelligence Open-Source Intelligence in the context of cybersecurity. It is a specific discipline within Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) that focuses on collecting and analyzing publicly available information tied to a physical location or geographical area.
Defining GI OSINT
The core of GI OSINT involves using mapping, satellite imagery, geotagged data, and location-based platforms to gather intelligence about a target organization, facility, or individual. While general OSINT encompasses any publicly available data, GI OSINT focuses specifically on the spatial and locational dimensions of that data.
This type of intelligence is invaluable to both defensive security teams and malicious attackers, as physical location often correlates with critical infrastructure and key personnel.
Sources of Geographic Information
Attackers performing GI OSINT use various public sources to collect geographical data:
Mapping Services: Platforms like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and OpenStreetMap are used to view and analyze an organization's physical locations, including office buildings, data centers, and surrounding infrastructure. This can reveal points of ingress, security features (like fences or gates), and network proximity.
Satellite and Aerial Imagery: High-resolution imagery can provide views of roof access, parking lots (which can reveal employee vehicle patterns), nearby construction, or the presence of visible satellite dishes or antennae that are part of the target's network.
Geotagged Metadata: Data embedded in publicly shared photos or videos (such as from social media platforms or news sites) can reveal precise coordinates of a building's interior or the location of sensitive equipment.
Location-Based Social Media and Apps: Checking platforms like Instagram, Yelp, Foursquare, or even fitness-tracking apps for check-ins, reviews, or photo uploads tagged to the target's physical address can expose employee habits, internal layouts, or vulnerabilities, such as unattended delivery entrances.
Public Planning and Regulatory Documents: Local government websites often contain public records, blueprints, permits, or environmental surveys that detail a building's internal layout, fire exits, utilities, and network cabling routes.
Significance in Cybersecurity
GI OSINT serves as a bridge between the physical and digital security domains. For an attacker, it can enable or enhance several attack vectors:
Targeted Physical Attacks: Identifying secure areas, entry points, and routine activities to facilitate a physical intrusion to plant a listening device or gain unauthorized network access.
Phishing and Social Engineering: Using highly specific locational details (e.g., "The server rack near the loading dock on the south side") to craft convincing social engineering lures, making the message appear to come from an insider or someone with physical presence.
Network Mapping: Correlating physical locations of different offices or data centers with known IP addresses to build a comprehensive map of the target's network topology.
Supply Chain Exploitation: Pinpointing the physical locations of key third-party vendors or partners to understand their geographic relationship to the main target and identify potential weak links.
Ultimately, GI OSINT turns abstract digital targeting into a concrete, high-fidelity threat, grounded in real-world spatial knowledge.
ThreatNG is well-equipped to help an organization defend against the intelligence gathering inherent in GI OSINT (Geographic Intelligence Open-Source Intelligence) by identifying and remediating the physical and technological exposures that an attacker would passively discover.
ThreatNG's Role in Countering GI OSINT
External Discovery
ThreatNG's core capability is performing purely external unauthenticated discovery using no connectors, which inherently mimics the reconnaissance efforts of an attacker performing GI OSINT. This process is crucial for discovering assets that could be linked to physical locations.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: An attacker conducting GI OSINT might search for IP address blocks associated with the organization's corporate headquarters. ThreatNG, through its IP Intelligence module, can discover the organization's IPs, ASNs (Autonomous System Numbers), and Country Locations. By mapping these digital assets, the organization can immediately identify which geographic footprints are associated with its online presence and prioritize hardening defenses around those areas.
External Assessment
ThreatNG's assessments directly rate the susceptibility stemming from passively observable, location-linked data.
Data Leak Susceptibility Security Rating (A-F): This rating is derived from identifying external digital risks, such as Cloud Exposure (specifically exposed open cloud buckets).
Example in Detail: An attacker using GI OSINT might find satellite imagery showing a new branch office. ThreatNG could then use its external discovery to find an exposed Amazon AWS S3 Bucket (Cloud Exposure) associated with that office's project, confirming the location is tied to a data leak risk. The Data Leak Susceptibility rating would be poor, alerting the security team that a geographically linked asset has a significant data exposure.
Mobile App Exposure (A-F): This evaluates how exposed an organization’s mobile apps are by checking for Platform-Specific Identifiers such as Admin Directories or Amazon AWS S3 Buckets.
Example in Detail: ThreatNG discovers an organization’s mobile app in an app marketplace. By analyzing its contents, the tool identifies the inclusion of a publicly accessible Firebase identifier. An attacker using GI OSINT on a forum might find a developer mention linking this Firebase account to a specific development team's office location. ThreatNG's discovery confirms the digital exposure that links back to a physical group.
Reporting
ThreatNG's reporting capabilities translate these locational and digital exposures into actionable risk management items.
Security Ratings (A through F): A poor rating in Data Leak Susceptibility directly resulting from an open cloud bucket associated with a known physical location provides a clear metric for executives to prioritize remediation.
Inventory Reports: These reports track all discovered assets, including those identified by IP Intelligence (IPs, ASNs, Country Locations) and Certificate Intelligence (TLS Certificates), allowing security teams to correlate digital assets with potential geographical or physical infrastructure, which is the core of GI OSINT defense.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous Monitoring of the external attack surface ensures that new geographical exposures, such as a new subdomain for a remote office, are detected immediately.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: A remote office sets up a new staging server whose IP address is inadvertently indexed publicly. ThreatNG's continuous monitoring detects the new IP and uses IP Intelligence to identify its Country Location and associated ASN. This prevents a GI OSINT attacker from finding this new, unmonitored server and associating it with the latest physical location before the organization can secure it.
Investigation Modules
ThreatNG provides specific investigation modules to combat the various data sources used in GI OSINT.
IP Intelligence: This module is critical, as every geographic location is tied to an IP address. It uncovers IP addresses, shared IP addresses, ASNs, and Country Locations.
Example in Detail: An analyst uses this module to determine that an exposed public-facing server's IP address is assigned to an ASN historically associated with a known, high-risk region. This allows the organization to correlate the physical location of the hosting provider with the digital risk profile.
Search Engine Exploitation / Search Engine Attack Surface: GI OSINT often relies on public search engines to find exposed files and folders. This module helps users investigate an organization’s susceptibility to exposing Privileged Folders, Susceptible Files, and User Data via search engines.
Example in Detail: ThreatNG uses this module to discover that a search engine has indexed a development directory URL (a Privileged Folder) that contains old configuration files. An attacker performing GI OSINT would use advanced search queries to find this directory, which may reveal internal network pathing linked to a physical office location.
Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)
ThreatNG’s repositories provide crucial external context for geographically linked assets.
Dark Web (DarCache Dark Web): This repository is essential for finding mentions of the organization, its personnel, or its physical locations in underground forums.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: If a threat actor is planning a targeted physical attack (a use case of GI OSINT) and discusses the specific geographical layout of an office building on a dark web forum, ThreatNG's Dark Web Presence module will detect this mention, providing a critical early warning that links a digital source to a physical threat.
SEC Form 8-Ks (DarCache 8-K): These filings, used in the Data Leak Susceptibility and Brand Damage Susceptibility ratings, often include mandatory disclosures of security incidents or lawsuits that may reveal the locations of affected systems or offices, providing geographical context that an attacker can exploit.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's specific GI-related findings can be used to strengthen the protective capabilities of other systems.
Cooperation with Physical Security Management Systems: When ThreatNG's IP Intelligence identifies a publicly exposed IP address at a critical facility (e.g., a data center), this high-risk finding can inform the Physical Security Management System. This system can then automatically flag personnel working at that specific geographic location to increase surveillance or restrict access logs, correlating the digital threat with the physical defense.
Cooperation with Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Platforms: Findings from the External GRC Assessment, particularly those related to Cloud and SaaS Exposure that may be tied to a specific geographic compliance region (like GDPR), can be fed into a complementary GRC Platform. This allows the platform to automatically update the risk register for that geographic jurisdiction based on ThreatNG's continuous external evaluation, ensuring compliance controls are always mapped to the real-world digital footprint.
