Theharvester (Information Gathering Tool)

Posted By Maher Bro

Hey awl m bck as i was busy these days.So today i will be telling you all about Harvester. It is a information gathering tool and as we know getting information is the first step in hacking.An intelligent penetration tester use some intelligent tools and techniques to get the right information on a right time, for social engineering (human hacking) you need relevant information about a person.

 

What is The Harvester

It is a tool which provides us information of about e-mail accounts, user names and hostnames/subdomains from different public sources like search engines and PGP key servers. This tool is very easy to use and as hackers first step is information gathering so by this tool they can get quite good and efficient result. There are different information gathering tools like nmap,zenmap,maletgo,etc. We will discuss about them also in later tutorials.

Downloading And Installing The Harvester

So if you are using backtrack than you not need to download and install harvester because it is available on backtrack, whereas for other Linux distributions like ubuntu download and install it. However you can download and use Theharvester for other Operating system as it needs python to run.

Basic Usage Of The Harvester

  For opening it in backtrack,open terminal and type cd /pentest/enumeration/theharvester as shown in
 the image below For other distributions locate the directory.

 

 For obtaining information you can use simple command that is ./theHarvester.py -d targetsite.com -l 500 -b google.

 This will search the information of target site in google. It allows google,bing,linkedin,pgp search options.

 For showing better and good results i took google for example.so for searching google information we will use command ./theHarvester.py -d google.com -l 500 -b google.

So i got result something like in below image.