SearchOL: An Information Gathering Tool

Abstract

Most organizations and their network administrators are familiar with penetration testing and possible attacks that can be done on a system through any software or hardware vulnerabilities of the system. System administrators, however neglect the quantity of system and user information that can be extracted anonymously from the content that is publicly available on the internet. This publicly available information is critical and of great use to penetration testers who wish to exploit the system. This work proposes a tool called ‘SearchOL’ developed in Python for gathering user related data from social sites using multiple search engines. Tool collects data passively and from the results proves to be a comprehensive data aggregator from multiple social platforms. The tool can be used for Information gathering which is the first phase of ethical hacking. The novelty of this tool is that it gives most important, most relevant and concise results from various search engines. It will help in reducing the efforts of the pen testers to gather information from public domains.