Legal hacking tools can be useful for journalists

Journalists and journalists are increasingly using tools such as Signal to easily access news sources and Tor to find sensitive topics anonymously. But there are other techniques and technologies that they can use to work: tools used by hackers.

No more exploiting vulnerabilities, cracking passwords or other criminals. Instead, journalists can use the software, mainly used by hackers to investigate objects, businesses, connections .

Legitimate hacking tools will help journalists and journalists very much in the course of their work

Imagine a hacker being given the legal right to test the enterprise's network security capabilities. Hackers want to map out the company's sitemap, including websites, email servers and other information to decide where to investigate more. They can use Maltego https://www.paterva.com/web7/buy/maltego-clients/maltego-ce.php , a toolkit to quickly find the website's IP address, get information from it, pictures Visualize data points and connect.

A journalist can do the same with that tool. It is possible that many fake pages do not have a clear connection but still share the same Google Analytics code, indicating it has the same owner. Or a reporter needs to find out about a spy company and see if they own another website.

Maltego is not simple, reporters can use many small tools for other specific tasks. To see when a certain Twitter user is online, see what time zone they are in, the journalist can collect tweets of the object and display it in general with the tool called tweets_analyzer https://github.com / x0rz / tweets_analyzer .

Although it is not specifically designed for hackers, an in-depth Google searcher can use it to discover hidden PDF files. For the convenience of using these tools in a single place, you can download custom operating systems like Buscador https://inteltechniques.com/buscador/index.html , there are many popular software available.

To query these searches at a fast pace, journalists will need to use tools to combine them and automate the process.

Datasploit https://github.com/DataSploit/datasploit is a command line tool that runs many tasks such as finding corporate email, Wikileak data. Users can get different bits of code, making different scans when needed. It also shares the same name with Metasploit https://www.rapid7.com/products/metasploit/ , the unpopular exploit framework that hackers use to test the object's defenses.

Effective open source tools not only help find new information but also collect and store. Journalists can use scripts to save tweets, Facebook profiles, and more instead of manual screen shots.

The list of useful tools for journalists is still very much, but it is important to see what other people are using and how to transform it to suit the problem you need to solve.