How to Spot Fake Businesses & Find the Signature of CEOs with OSINT

How to Spot Fake Businesses & Find the Signature of CEOs with OSINT

Businesses leave paper trails for nearly every activity they do, making it easy for a hacker or researcher to dig up everything from business licenses to a CEO's signature if they know where to look. To do this, we'll dig into the databases of government organizations and private companies to learn everything we can about businesses and the people behind them.


You can probably imagine why it might be useful to find out if a business is real or not. It can also be helpful to verify if a particular person works for a company they say that they do. While this information almost always exists, it's not usually accessible with a simple Google search. A lot of this information is in databases that require you to submit search queries to discover it.


Background Check a Business


To be a good researcher, we'll have to find out where the information is, and what search terms we'll need to use to extract it. Whether we're doing recon on a business to find out if it's legit, or looking for a target to craft the perfect phishing email to, there are plenty of reasons why this information might be useful.


If you want to know that a business is legit, the best place to start is digging into their licenses and key people. Finding evidence of being licensed is a positive sign, and will also lead to the names of the employees and officers listed on those documents. Finding these official documents allows you to cross-check information to look for inconsistencies or patterns, like the same people or addresses being used to register similarly disconnected businesses.


Create the Perfect Phishing Email


If you're a penetration ..

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