theHarvester a tool to perform security audit

Written on Jan. 14, 2020 .

Last update on Dec. 11, 2020.

theHarvester is a tool for gathering e-mail accounts, subdomain names, virtual hosts, open ports/ banners, and employee names from different public sources (search engines, pgp key servers). It can largely have you perform Major security audit to determine your company external security threats

Auditing your Company or Social accounts for external threats using theHarvester.

Let's face it, We all don't see our-self as the bad guys do see us or our interaction from the internet. Each day on the dark-web there are hundreds of thousands of email leaks, those leaks may include your own from your favorite site. There are sites out there dedicated to investigating leaks and warning users for possible changes.

Some of those site include;

Firefox Monitor
Hacked-Emails
theHarvester online

Besides those site that help you to check for external threats there are Audit tools dedicated to auditing a sites external threats one of those tools include

thHarvester

the Harvester is a very simple, yet effective tool designed to be used in the early stages of a penetration test. Use it for open source intelligence gathering and helping to determine a company's external threat landscape on the internet. The tool gathers emails, names, subdomains, IPs, and URLs using multiple public data sources.

Setting up theharvester for auditing

This tool theharvester request python3.7+ you must be having that python version ready on your system. The following setups have been tested on both ubuntu and debian.

# First setup python3 pip
$
$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip 
$ sudo pip3 install virtualenv
$
# Create virtualenv 
$
$ virtualenv venv
$
# Or create a python version specific virtualenv
$
$ virtualenv -p python3 myenv
$
# Then install the harvester from pip3
$
$ pip3 install theHarvester
$

Auditing a site for information

$
$ theHarvester -d nmmapper.com -b google
$
[*] Target: nmmapper.com
[*] Google Searching. 
Searching 0 results. 
Searching 100 results. 
Searching 200 results. 
Searching 300 results. 
Searching 400 results. 
Searching 500 results.
[*] No IPs found.
[*] No emails found.
[*] Hosts found: 2 
--------------------- 
ww.nmmapper.com: 
www.nmmapper.com:104.24.102.134, 104.24.103.134

You will notice the following options;

$ -d # this options is a domain option
$ -b # this options is for search source

This tool has over 20+ public sources for searching host information or target information from the internet. Some of this sources require for more effective results. This tool is very easy to use

the Harvester will get the following information