The title says it all.
Archive for 2012
Some brave, bold academic decided to stand up to a commercial pay-fee deep website that holds academic articles. The result you will read about below, but in essence, bad things happened.
This highlights a moral battle. There is a a great deal of financial gain to the gatekeepers of wonderful data behind fee-pay portals of Deep Web sites.
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20120917.aspx
From Strategypage – September 17, 2012: Last July the U.S. Army issued a manual, Army Techniques Publication 2-22.9, on using open source (mainly searching the Internet) intelligence. Also called OSINT, the troops have been using the Internet for intelligence work for over a decade. The publication of ATP 22.9 is a way for the senior army leadership to say, “message received and understood.” ATP 22.9, despite all the useful tips it contains, won’t go far in helping the many soldiers already using the Internet but it will be useful in convincing their bosses that much useful stuff can be obtained from the Internet.
While the U.S. intelligence community officially recognized the importance of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) back in 2004, it was years before there was a lot of enthusiasm from the top brass for using this growing source of information.
The Internet has made OSINT a really, really huge source of useful intelligence. It’s not just the millions of gigabytes of information that is placed on the net but the even more voluminous masses of message board postings, blogs, emails, and IMs (instant messaging) that reveal what the culture is currently thinking. It was corporate intelligence practitioners who alerted the government intel people to the growing usefulness of Internet based data. Corporations have developed, over the last few decades, a keen interest in gathering intel on competitors, new markets, and all manner of things that might affect them. This “competitive intelligence” (or corporate spying) became big business. The Internet has made this a much more useful exercise.
However, corporate intel specialists were concerned that government agencies, especially the CIA, were not taking sufficient advantage of OSINT. Part of the problem was cultural. The intelligence agencies have always been proud of their special intel tools, like spy satellites, electronic listening stations, and spy networks. Most of these things are unique to government intelligence operations. People who use this stuff tend to look down on a bunch of geeks who simply troll the web. Even when the geeks keep coming up with valuable stuff, they don’t get any respect. The fear was that some foreign countries were exploiting OSINT more effectively than the United States. No foreign intel agency will admit to this but there are indications that some nations are mining the Internet quite intensively and effectively.
This fear grew as China, Russia, and other nations were caught using the Internet for direct espionage (hacking into other nations’ networks). While examining that threat it was discovered that the heavy use of OSINT was part of the hacking operations. Thus over the last five years the CIA and other major intel agencies got more enthusiastic about OSINT, and this made it easier for Internet-savvy army leaders to get ATP 22.9 into print.
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Ok, so maybe I missed a few lectures in college. Perhaps quite a few.
Discovered and Tested out some new engines. The main catch of the day is the Bielefeld BASE search engine. Very nice, very deep.
So we’ve been looking for mega deep web engines tied into non-US technical papers. And we hit a beauty. It ties into Italian, Russian, Indian, Finish, Chinese and all kinds of others. Here is a snapshot of the databases it backs into.
It can be found at
You can search the Deep Web for many topics, but searching for academic scholarship has the fewest headaches.
There are many ways to use the deep web. Both good, evil, and in between. The Google Hacking Diggity Project is all three.
In this case, a deep web tool-set was developed to aid penetration testers (white hat), hackers (black hat), and hobbyist (want a hat) to gather open source intelligence (OSInt) on potential targets to aid their hacking attempts.
The focus was to use Bing and Google to the max to dig out some kind-of-deep-web assets to the fore.
http://www.stachliu.com/resources/tools/google-hacking-diggity-project/
Lots of Video on the 3 sites about InfoSec and Cyber security. Because Video is Deep Web, I’ll include it in the search engine resource page
Cyber War / InfoSec
Iron Geek irongeek.com — An excellent library of videos explaining many facets of InfoSec and hacking & security
Security Tube – securitytube.net — A large library of videos covering many topics in InfoSec, cyberwar, and most of the hacking conferences.
DefCon — The main hackers Con, so well known that now the Feds send their folks here and it has become a wild west training ground for coming trends. Archives go back to Defcon 1. They are now on Defcon 20, I think.
Almost everyone who is anyone knows about the massive video catalog of YouTube.