OSINT: Rapid search engine deployment with YaCy

By ph055a 

Medium

2 min

October 26, 2018

View Original

Today I am going to share with you a powerful OSINT gathering technique. We are going to create a search engine with a limited index. This works well for indexing websites of interest during your collection phase. If you find a target website or you find that username you’ve been looking for on Reddit, then add the domain to YaCy for indexing.

So if you could make an OSINT search engine what would it be? how about a fake news search engine? A hate group search engine? Maybe a search engine for criminal forums? I’ll let you decide, first let’s get it installed.

Just a moment, let’s define what YaCy is before we continue.

YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. https://yacy.net

Step 1: Installation (Linux)

Windows and Mac users should consult the YaCy website for install instructions.

On Ubuntu you should have snapd already installed by default, but let’s just make sure with the following command.

sudo apt install snapd -y

Now that we are sure we have snap installed let’s install the YaCy Search snap.

sudo snap install yacy-search --edge

That’s all you need to install YaCy and not only that, this is exactly how we are going to deploy YaCy when we move to a Digital Ocean droplet.

Step 2: Running YaCy

Now we need to run YaCy and open up the admin console so we can begin. Open your terminal back up and run the following command.

yacy-search

You should see a similar output, Yacy should open in your default browser automatically.

Now that we have YaCy Search running we need to open up a web browser and enter localhost:8090 in the URL bar and press enter. Good, now you should be looking at the YaCy Search engine. Click the button on the top right to enter the admin area.

Boom, this is where all the fun stuff starts to happen. You should be looking at an admin page similar to the one below.

That’s it for the setup, in the next post I will be showing you how effective this technique can be and I will show you some details that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Until then you can learn more at OSINT Team Server, we have a great community of very clever people.

Laterz …..

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