You work as a security analyst in a SOC and want to know if information about your organization’s network devices is available through open-source intelligence searches on the internet. Which tool is most appropriate?

For a security analyst in a SOC looking to find out if information about the organization’s network devices is available publicly on the internet, the most appropriate tool to use would be Shodan.

Shodan is a search engine that scans the internet and provides information about internet-connected devices, including network devices. It can reveal what devices are connected to the internet, what software and versions they are running, and other details that could potentially expose vulnerabilities. Shodan is particularly useful for discovering which of your organization’s devices are publicly accessible and potentially vulnerable to cyber threats.

The other tools mentioned have different primary uses:

• Maltego is more focused on link analysis and data mining for gathering information about networks and relationships between different data points, which is useful for digital forensics and information gathering in a broader sense.
• FOCA (Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives) is used to analyze metadata and hidden information in the documents.
• Netcraft provides internet security services including anti-fraud and anti-phishing services, web server security, and risk ratings, but it’s less focused on directly identifying exposed network devices.