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How To Gather Intelligence (Know Thy Enemy)

Let's go back to my "real world" analogy for a moment. A police officer is
at a crime scene, and discovers what's believed to be the perpetrator's
thumbprint on a door handle. He lifts it, and takes it back to the lab,
where it's scanned into a computer. The print is now compared against every
print in a national database, to see if there's a match. If there is, the
officer now has the name of a suspect. If there's not, he has little more
than what he started with (until, of course, a suspect is found using other
means). The goal is to get a database with fingerprints with of as many
people as possible. This is done by printing people who are arrested, or by
having parents get their children fingerprinted in kindergarten (for their
own protection, of course).

Now, let's move back into the "digital realm". The same concept obviously
holds true. In order for the "field principle" to be worth anything, one
must first come up with a database to use to compare data against. This
helps not only to "identify" a hacker or hackgroup (like one would
"identify" a fingerprint in the national database), but also to help
examine motive, threat potential, and possibly predicting future hacks,
based on what hackers or groups similar to them have done in the past.

Gathering "intelligence" from the "underground community", however, can
pose some interesting challenges. But, in some ways, it can also be much
easier than gathering "physical intelligence".

I'm going to cover a few simple ways to gather this "intelligence". There
are a few important things that you need to remember about the hacker
community, which will help greatly in this task.

Unlike many criminals, malicious hackers (i.e. crackers), for the most
part, WANT people to know who they are. They're being driven by many
things, including: ego, the desire for attention or recognition, and most
importantly, the desire to be accepted by their peer group.

This means that the easiest way to gather information, is from the horse's
mouth itself.

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