Social Media OSINT
Social Media OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) is a subset of the broader intelligence practice that focuses specifically on collecting and analyzing publicly available information from social media platforms and related online sources to derive actionable insights for cybersecurity.
Purpose and Methodology
Social Media OSINT is a critical tool for both defenders and attackers, as social networks are a rich and dynamic source of human-centric data.
1. The Attacker's Perspective (Reconnaissance)
Threat actors use Social Media OSINT during the reconnaissance phase of an attack to build a detailed profile on a target organization or its personnel while remaining non-intrusive and undetected.
Social Engineering Mapping: Attackers gather personal details, professional roles, affiliations, and even employee relationships from sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter). This data is used to craft highly personalized and convincing phishing emails (spear-phishing) or to create a false identity (pretext) for a voice scam.
Vulnerability Identification: Employees may inadvertently reveal sensitive information, such as the specific technology stack a company uses, project names, or even internal procedures, through casual posts, photos, or job-related discussions.
Brand Impersonation Staging: Attackers use social platforms to create fake pages or profiles that impersonate a legitimate brand to propagate scams, spread misinformation, or steal customer credentials.
2. The Defender's Perspective (Digital Risk Protection)
Cybersecurity professionals use Social Media OSINT to identify and mitigate these exposures before adversaries exploit them.
Human Attack Surface Visibility: Security teams proactively monitor social platforms, forums, and the dark web to identify leaked employee credentials, find sensitive data accidentally shared on public channels, and track any signs of brand impersonation.
Threat Intelligence: It provides real-time insights into coordinated campaigns, misinformation efforts, and emerging threats by monitoring hashtags, trends, and discussions in hacker forums.
Security Training Improvement: The data gathered helps organizations understand what information is currently exposed, allowing them to strengthen defenses and tailor employee security awareness training to address specific social media hygiene risks.
Social Media OSINT is an essential practice because, with the vast amount of user-generated content, it serves as a digital trail, providing direct, public access to information that can be weaponized against an organization.
ThreatNG is exceptionally effective at countering Social Media OSINT by turning the tables on the attacker. It provides the defending organization with the same comprehensive, external intelligence that adversaries use to build social engineering profiles, allowing the organization to proactively discover, map, and neutralize its own Human Attack Surface.
ThreatNG's Role in Neutralizing Social Media OSINT
External Discovery
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery using no connectors, ensuring it maps the organization's entire external footprint where human-centric data is likely exposed.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: An attacker's initial step in Social Media OSINT is to find all publicly available assets. ThreatNG's discovery process identifies Archived Web Pages related to the organization. An attacker might find an old company directory containing employee Emails and User Names in these archives. ThreatNG finds this historical PII first, enabling the organization to be aware of and remediate this information exposure.
External Assessment
ThreatNG's security ratings quantify the risks associated with human and social media-enabled security failures, guiding where to break the reconnaissance map.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Security Rating (A-F): This rating is heavily influenced by Email Format Guessability and Domain Name Permutations. Since Social Media OSINT provides names, this information is critical.
Example in Detail: ThreatNG confirms, via Email Intelligence, that the organization has high Email Format Guessability (e.g., using first.last@company.com). An attacker who finds an employee's name on LinkedIn (Social Media OSINT) can now generate a list of valid corporate email addresses. ThreatNG's poor rating (e.g., "F") flags this specific design flaw that enables large-scale spear-phishing.
Data Leak Susceptibility Security Rating (A-F): This rating is driven by Compromised Credentials.
Example in Detail: ThreatNG's assessment finds that a key executive's professional credentials are leaked and present in its Compromised Credentials intelligence. An attacker uses Social Media OSINT to find the executive's personal interests and combines that with the leaked credential to craft a highly believable social engineering attack. The poor rating mandates an immediate change to credentials and a security review.
Cyber Risk Exposure Security Rating (A-F): This rating assesses human-enabled technical exposures, such as missing WHOIS privacy.
Example in Detail: ThreatNG finds that an executive’s personal PII is exposed because a related domain lacks WHOIS privacy. This external exposure is a gift to an attacker, allowing them to gain leverage for Executive Extortion or domain hijacking. The poor rating immediately quantifies this human-enabled risk.
Reporting
ThreatNG's reporting ensures the often-overlooked human-centric risks are clearly communicated and prioritized, driving defense improvements.
MITRE ATT&CK Mapping: ThreatNG automatically correlates human-centric findings (like leaked PII or exposed ports) with the Initial Access technique in the MITRE ATT&CK framework. This provides security leaders with a clear, strategic view of exactly how the attacker would use the Social Media OSINT data to enter the network.
Prioritized Reports: These reports classify findings stemming from Social Media OSINT (e.g., exposed PII on a subdomain or a user alias on the dark web) as High-Risk, requiring immediate attention and remediation.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous Monitoring of the external attack surface ensures that the organization is immediately alerted to new, unexpected exposures of human data, preventing the attacker from completing a current reconnaissance map.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: A new employee inadvertently posts a photo to social media with a project name visible. Continuous monitoring detects this new social footprint, allowing the security team to act immediately to remove the image and prevent the data from being used to map internal project relationships (a key goal of Social Engineering Reconnaissance Mapping).
Investigation Modules
ThreatNG's specialized modules provide the tools to actively map and neutralize the specific data attackers use for Social Media OSINT.
Social Media Investigation Module: This module proactively safeguards against targeted attacks on executives and employees (the Human Attack Surface).
Username Exposure: This conducts a Passive Reconnaissance scan for usernames across a wide range of social media (like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok) and high-risk forums (like GitHub, Pastebin).
Example in Detail: An analyst uses this module to search for a developer's common alias and finds it active on a popular Code & Repository site. This confirmed identity and professional role are high-value intelligence for an attacker, but ThreatNG provides the organization with the needed visibility to address the developer's external digital hygiene.
LinkedIn Discovery: This module identifies employees who are explicitly most susceptible to social engineering attacks.
Example in Detail: By identifying employees whose publicly available professional data (roles, connections) makes them susceptible, the organization gains measurable visibility into which human assets are easiest for an attacker to target with a custom pretext, enabling targeted defense.
Online Sharing Exposure: This module tracks organizational presence on online code- and file-sharing platforms such as Pastebin and GitHub Gist.
Example in Detail: An employee accidentally uploads an internal document to a file-sharing site. ThreatNG finds this PII leakage (employee names, contacts), which an attacker would use for Social Media OSINT to enrich their profile.
Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)
The intelligence repositories provide real-world evidence and threat context to prioritize the highest-risk human vulnerabilities identified via OSINT.
Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): This repository is the definitive source for proving that employee credentials have been leaked, which is the ultimate goal of reconnaissance mapping.
Dark Web (DarCache Dark Web): This monitors for explicit organizational mentions and Associated Compromised Credentials.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: ThreatNG discovers chatter on a dark web forum discussing plans to use a specific, high-value executive's name and exposed social media data for an upcoming Extortion attempt, providing an early warning of an imminent attack.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external metrics on human exposure can be integrated with other platforms to automate the defense against Social Media OSINT risks.
Cooperation with Security Awareness Training Platforms: When ThreatNG's Compromised Credentials module detects a surge in leaked employee passwords, this quantified risk can be sent to a complementary Security Awareness Training Platform. This integration automatically enrolls the affected employees in a targeted course on social media hygiene and credential reuse, directly mitigating the risks found during reconnaissance mapping.
Cooperation with IAM Solutions: High-risk findings from the Compromised Credentials repository related to an employee's leaked password can be sent to an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution. The IAM system can automatically enforce a mandatory password reset and immediate Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) enrollment for that user, neutralizing the threat originating from the external social media exposure.
