OSINT technique for information gathering and Background Verification


We will see osint way to gather online info about the target. In this post I will use various open source tools and technique for passive information gathering.


Lets assume our target is shaquib izhar. All we have is this name and we need to find as much information about him as possible.

We will start with simple Google Dorking. My first query will be “shaquib izhar” this will give all websites, URL where this specific name is available. Let’s see what result we get from this search.




We got his twitter profile, quora and other social media accounts registered with this name. There’s also a link of about.me profile on Google search associated with this name. Let's go to that link and see if we can gather some another information.

Below we can see there’s a connect with me LinkedIn link of his profile


Now, because I am using a VPN, whenever I follow that LinkedIn profile link, it is asking me to login to view that profile. And we can’t login because it can notify the user that someone have seen his profile or if you have not configured your profile correctly then it can also reveal your identity.

And second case could be if the person is using LinkedIn pro feature, then he can see who was the LinkedIn user who has visited his profile.


But there’s a way to bypass this login and view that profile anonymously. Osint curious has done a great research on this. I will describe the method step step by step below.

Copy the LinkedIn profile link


Go to https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly and enter the profile URL then select test URL


As shown below, we can see his profile page, but there is a limitation we can’t scroll below to see other details.

But there’s a way to see his complete details on LinkedIn. Go to the HTML section of the page and copy the HTML code



Now go to https://codebeautify.org/htmlviewer/ and paste the code in it and select the beautify option



After selecting beautify option we will get a properly structured HTML code as shown below


Copy this code and paste inside the HTML input option


 Finally, after running the code we can see the LinkedIn user complete profile and his details.





Above we can see that I got all the details of the user’s LinkedIn profile anonymously. Let’s see if we can gather any more info about the target. In his LinkedIn profile he mentioned his portfolio link (shaquibizhar.000webhostapp.com) let see what we can get from there.




Looks like he has deleted this site let’s check for the archive version of this site.  I tried my search on archive.is and cache:shaquibizhar.000webhostapp.com but couldn't find any archive for this. but fortunately i was able to fetch the site at archive.org



Above I got his email. There are websites to search for leaked password of emails. Let’s see if we can get something from there. I am going to search on http://pwndb2am4tzkvold.onion


Great! We have got his password now it’s time to get his location and gather as much accurate information about his location as possible.

I will use grabify for making the IP tracer link and will spoof the link with other popular sites.

When the target will click on the link I will get his address, locations etc and the URL will be redirected to Google.com



Final Words


Above I got his IP location, Device Details ( Blurred some personal info)

So this was some basic techniques for passive information gathering using OSINT technique. There are  lots of other advance way to gather info about the target like getting his picture from his phone. Getting his available details from current company where he is working. Which I will cover in my upcoming post.

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