jolenzy's blog

Information gahtering is generally divided into two categories, passive information gathering and active information gathering.
Passive information gathering can be defined as collecting information without making any active connections, like port scans, ... For this purpose, we can use search engines, on-line scanners and Internet archives, like Usenet, web page cashes,...

So, what is the most powerfull tool for this? I guess you know the answer... Google!
Beside Google, there are some more search engines that can be very usufull, like:

teoma.com
excite.com
metacrawler.com

Back to Google. Google has many advanced features, like operators, which can help us in finding informations.
You can see operators here: http://www.google.com/help/operators.html

We should not forget to search newsgroups, p2p networks, job and spam databases, b2b portals...
or to check whois database information or query dns information online.
All of this sources can yield useful information about our target.
Imagine a question on newsgroups like: "New patch for my apache version 2.0.59 is not working, can someone help?". You see your way here... :)
Or from job databases, you can see what your target(organization/company) requires from system administrator,... or something like that... and you got the picture slowly... :)

Another excellent resource is netcraft.com, which gives a lot of information about a given domain and much
more. Check it out...

That's it for now about passive information gathering...