Hunting Cyber Criminals: A Hacker’s Guide to Online Intelligence Gathering Tools and Techniques

By Simon Cocking review of Hunting Cyber Criminals: A Hacker’s Guide to Online Intelligence Gathering Tools and Techniques by Vinny Troia explores Open Source Intelligence Gathering (OSINT) from multiple perspectives and breaks down proven techniques for tracking cybercrime to its source.

The book uses a blend of story-telling, tutorials, and case studies, combining the author’s expertise with guest commentary from fellow industry experts including Chis Hadnagy, Leslie Carhart, Troy Hunt and many others, to provide vital guidance that will help organisations investigate cybersecurity incidents.

Troia – a cybersecurity evangelist and hacker with Night Lion Security and an acknowledged expert in digital forensics investigations, security strategies, and security breach remediation – outlines his unique methodology and practical methods to help guide cybersecurity and business professionals tasked with developing cyber incident response strategies better investigate, uncover information, firm up defences, involve law enforcement, and shut down hackers for good.

Hunting Cyber Criminals: A Hacker’s Guide to Online Intelligence Gathering Tools and Techniques reviewed

This book is a great read. Some parts were way over our heads, but each chapter starts from a reasonable premise. Some books like this can get too deep, too technical, too quickly and too easily. This book however was utterly compelling, well explained, accessible, and made you want to keep reading and learning, even as you occasionally almost wanted to put your hands over your eyes.

Troia explains in an engaging and understandable way what the threats are, how exploits are found and used to nefarious ends. He also robustly discusses the tools used, the insights he has gleaned from them, and also, interestingly and refreshingly the mistakes he has made, and the lessons he learned from them. Ego trumps OPSEC is a repeated refrain throughout the book and time and time again he explains how this has caught out many a hacker. Even, fascinatingly by those who have updated Wikipedia pages to ensure their achievements and exploits are accurately documented, even at the cost of revealing their true identities and locations. Time and time again ego trumps OPSEC…

We hadn’t necessarily expected this book to be so readable, even for the more general reader but it is and we would recommend taking at least a quick spin through these pages. The whole final 3rd of the book, Part IV People Hunting, makes for fascinating reading and shows how social engineering is relatively easy to do, and opens up some potentially serious security issues both personally and for companies. Check it out.

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