SpiderFoot is an open‑source project and freely available.
There's also a commercial service based on SpiderFoot called SpiderFoot HX.
It is cloud‑hosted, so no local installation is needed.
It includes modules that are not available in the open‑source
version. Scans are faster than the open‑source version.
You can get notifications in email or through Slack.
If you have a team, you can collaborate with them on scans and investigations.
SpiderFoot HX also utilizes Tor for access to the dark web.
The various levels include a hobby level,
which is free, freelancer, business, and an enterprise level, which
has access to all SpiderFoot HX capabilities.
SpiderFoot's official documentation is available on the SpiderFoot
website and the GitHub site. You'll also find various demonstrations
from the SpiderFoot team on ASCII Cinema.
Other capabilities include the easy creation of a Docker container to
run SpiderFoot, integration with Tor for anonymized searches, you can
add username and password authentication to SpiderFoot, you can also
utilize Transport Layer Security, or TLS, to secure your communications
to your SpiderFoot system.
SpiderFoot can also export data in several formats
for processing in other systems.
There are several information sources that SpiderFoot
can interact with through API calls.
These services provide additional details to SpiderFoot reports.
In most cases, you can sign up for a free account.
These include Shodan, AbuseIPDB, VirusTotal, GreyNoise, and PhishTank.
And there are many others as well.
If you're an organization concerned about data exposures that
SpiderFoot can discover on your organization,
what should you do?
Well, start with reducing your attack surface, remove anything on the
perimeter that isn't needed, and do a better job of managing your
organization's social media accounts and content, and do a close
analysis of any identified exposures.
You may find opportunities to reduce the available information and lower the
risk of an attacker utilizing it against your organization.
Here are some key points I want you to consider for SpiderFoot. First, let's
look at the reconnaissance capabilities that SpiderFoot has.
There isn't a lot of setup needed to get started gathering information.
We provide SpiderFoot with a simple starting point, that seed target.
It could be a domain name, an email address, or an IP address.
From that simple starting point, SpiderFoot starts gathering
data and expands out from there.
An email address leads to an account name, which leads to social media
accounts, which leads to an organization, and so on.
SpiderFoot can actively gather data from a target website or probe some TCP
ports on that target, or we can just rely on data gathered from third‑party
sources without directly interacting with the target.
When we start our search,
we can select our approach to data gathering through a defined use case.
This allows us to gather everything,
look at a subset of data, or just take a passive approach.
We can also be more granular and use specific modules or look for
specific data types. From an operational perspective, SpiderFoot
is a well‑thought‑out InDesign tool.
It gathers data from a variety of data sources on the internet,
it takes advantage of what other services have already gathered
about our targets of interest.
Some of those services limit access to that data,
but we can get access to it through SpiderFoot's built‑in API capabilities.
SpiderFoot is an open‑source tool, and the Python code
it's written in is very readable,
which is helpful if you want to understand what is going on under the hood.
It has a modular design, which makes it easier to build new
capabilities through the creation of additional modules. And
finally, you can deploy SpiderFoot in a variety of ways from using
what's provided in Kali Linux, to grabbing the latest version of
building a Docker container for it.
You can also add credentials and utilize TLS if you
need. And if all of that is too much,
there's a hosted commercial version available.
That's all for this course, but remember that SpiderFoot has a
wealth of capabilities waiting to be explored.
I hope you enjoyed the demonstrations of SpiderFoot and can put
that information to good use in your work.
Thank you for watching.
I'm Keith Watson, and I look forward to learning with you on the next course.
Please leave me some feedback on this course.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.