In Plaintext

People have long gone online to groom their online identities, to communicate some aspects of themselves in the real. The information shared is purposive and strategic. Inevitably, the information is selective and incomplete. The cyber may evoke something about the physical only to a degree, in the cyber-physical confluence. In an asymmetrical information environment, those who have the most accurate and requisite information often have the advantage. It is said that much of intelligence is conducted using Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), which suggests a need for reading between the lines of publicly released information; indeed, much of life is conducted in online public spaces. A number of tools enable the extraction and analysis of information from public sites. When used in combination, these tools may create a fairly clear sense of the online presences of various individuals or organizations or networks online for increased transparency. This chapter describes some of the tools (Maltego Radium™ and Network Overview, Discovery, and Exploration for Excel/NodeXL™) that may be used to increase the knowability of others in the creation of various profiles. This includes some light applications of “inference attacks” based on publicly available information. Further information may be captured from the Hidden Web through tools designed to crawl that understructure, and this potential is addressed a little as well.