

When you do, we'll also need to install some dependencies. To get started with Photon, make sure you have Python3 installed. Type quit() to exit the Python shell, and we'll get started installing what we need to run Photon. Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. If your output looks like below, you're ready to go. If you don't have it installed, you can install it with apt-install python3. To check if your system has Python installed, you can open a terminal window and type python3. I find that it crashes running Python2, so I recommend running it with the python3 command before it, despite what the GitHub instructions say. Photon is a popular tool because it's cross-platform, meaning it will work on any system with Python installed. While using Photon effectively takes some patience and understanding of the many available filters, it doesn't take much to get started pulling in clues about your target What You'll Need You can use preserved previous states of webpages documented on the Wayback Machine as a "seed" for your search, scraping all the URLs off of the now-defunct website as a source for further crawling. Don't Miss: Use the Buscador OSINT VM for Conducting Online InvestigationsĪside from looking at current webpages, Photon also allows you to look into the past.One of the most useful Photon features is the ability to recognize and extract certain kinds of data automatically, like page scripts, email addresses, and important passwords or API keys that may be exposed by accident.

Rather than just looking for vulnerabilities, Photon quickly parses what's out there and displays it to the hacker in a way that's easy to understand. Photon OSINT scanner fills this niche by providing a flexible, easy-to-use command line interface for crawling through target webpages. This rules out some of the more obvious methods of scanning and enumeration, requiring some creativity in searching for clues. We can use a web crawler designed for OSINT called Photon to do the heavy lifting, sifting through URLs on our behalf to retrieve information of value to a hacker.Īll of this is used to learn as much as possible about the target without tipping them off that they're being watched. Gathering information on an online target can be a time-consuming activity, especially if you only need specific pieces of information about a target with a lot of subdomains.
