Hacking Web Intelligence Open Source Intelligence and Web Reconnaissance Concepts and Techniques – Metadata

This article is from Botneting With Browser Extensions edition, which is available for download for free. by Sudhanshu Chauhan and Nutan Kumar Panda In the last few chapters we have learned extensively about how to find information online. We learned about different platforms, different techniques to better utilize these platforms, and also tools which can automate the process of data extraction. In this chapter we will deal with a special kind of data, which is quite interesting but usually gets ignored, the metadata. Earlier metadata was a term mostly talked about in the field of information science domain only, but with the recent news circulation stating that National Security Agency has been snooping metadata related to phone records of its citizens, it is becoming a household name. Though still many people don’t understand exactly what metadata is and how it can be used against them, let alone how to safeguard themselves from....