Introduction to OSINT: Recon-ng Tutorial

Learn to use this framework to automate OSINT collection Dakota Nelson
Oct 06, 2016

Intelligence collection is manual. It’s tedious. It takes forever.

But you don’t have to do it all on your own.

Using tools like recon-ng, you can automate your open source intelligence collection process - whether it’s for business intelligence or security reconnaissance. Find out how to use recon-ng in this quick tutorial video:

This how-to video gets you up to speed with a quick introduction to recon-ng, a great framework for collecting OSINT automatically, and then goes straight into an example so you can see how the information gathering process works in practice.

In it, you’ll learn:

• how to run recon-ng and use the built-in help system
• the basics of using workspaces to organize your OSINT engagements and keep records
• methodology for starting your investigation by manually adding data and API keys to build from
• techniques for conducting real-world reconnaissance using recon-ng’s built-in capabilities, including how to choose which recon-ng modules to run
• analysis methods to query recon-ng’s database and view the intelligence you’ve collected

PLUS, download this recon-ng cheatsheet to get a description of every module in one convenient PDF.

You can view recon-ng’s source code and documentation directly. There’s also an excellent recon-ng usage guide written by recon-ng’s creator, Tim Tomes.