Business Intelligence- A Students Perspective

This week I got to do the first module in the “Reconnaissance” module, “Business Intelligence” and I have to admit, I was blown away.

In this module we covered various ways to gather intelligence about a target (business), and I learned a lot of methods that I didn’t know previously. I knew some of the more basic techniques such as looking at LinkedIn profiles and looking at job posts, but this module took it to the next level. I had never heard of EDGAR, I had never thought about going through archived mailing lists, in my world “theHarvester” was a syslog gatherer (It’s actually a cool tool that polls search engines results to get email addresses for various social engineering schemes), and then there is Maltego. I learned a lot of great methods and tools in this module that I will have to employ against my employers to gather info (For white hat purposes obviously).

And then, there was the lab. Man, I think this was the longest lab to date. It really caught me off guard how much time it would take. The lab in this module was to do business intelligence gathering on four targets. And expect to spend 90-120 minutes minimum per target. Yeah, that’s 6 hours minimum. But, it did definitely teach me two key things: It is scary how much information you can gather on a target from just the Internet, and the importance of note taking. I can’t stress the importance of note taking enough (And neither can The Hacker Academy, as it’s come up in multiple modules). Even though the lab took some time to complete, it was a lot of fun and it was extremely eye-opening.

Looking forward to the next module: Network Intelligence!