OSINT Methodology — External Red-Team Edition

0. When to use this skill / When NOT

Use this skill when:

• Planning or executing external reconnaissance against an authorized target (red team, bug bounty in-scope, ASM engagement).
• Mapping an organization's external attack surface end-to-end (subdomains → assets → exposure → attack paths).
• Investigating a person, entity, or threat actor where evidence discipline matters.
• Tracing cryptocurrency flows, geolocating media, performing image/video forensics, or chronolocating events.
• Building a structured OSINT campaign that needs reproducibility, severity grading, and clean handoffs.
• Producing client-facing deliverables (exec summaries, technical reports, reproduction packages) from offensive engagements.

Do NOT use this skill when:

• The user is asking for active exploitation, post-exploitation, lateral movement, AD privilege escalation, malware development, or anything beyond reconnaissance — those are out of scope.
• The user is asking for blue-team / defensive content (SIEM rules, detection engineering) — different domain.
• The target's authorization is unclear and the user is asking you to act against a third-party asset they don't own — see §1 below; gently surface the scope question before proceeding.

1. Authorization & Legal Posture

This skill is intended for assets the operator owns or has written authorization to assess (red-team rules of engagement, bug-bounty in-scope assets, ASM contracts).

Soft scope check: when a user asks you to act against a target whose authorization isn't established earlier in the conversation, ask once before proceeding:

"Quick scope check: is this a target you own or have written authorization to assess (e.g., a red-team engagement, in-scope bug-bounty asset, or your own infrastructure)? I want to make sure we stay on the right side of the engagement boundary."

Once authorization is asserted, proceed without re-asking. If the user explicitly states the engagement type (e.g., "this is for our pentest of acme.com under contract"), you don't need to ask again.

Always-on guardrails (regardless of authorization):

• Never weaken auth, rate limits, banners, or any safety control that enforces scope on the target side.
• Never run destructive probes (true SYN scans on production, masscan at line rate, fuzzing/brute-force) outside an explicit DEEP / --aggressive mode.
• Never paste real PII, valid credentials, session tokens, API keys, or other secrets into cloud-hosted LLMs or third-party services.
• Never take action against assets outside the documented scope, even if "obviously related" (subsidiaries, vendors, employees' personal accounts, etc.).

2. Confidence Levels

Every assertion you make during an engagement should carry a confidence level. Three levels:

Rule of three for attribution: require three independent weak signals, OR one strong + one weak, before asserting linkage. Don't single-source attribute.

2.1 Confidence Upgrade Workflows

Confidence isn't static — every TENTATIVE asset should have a documented path to FIRM and to CONFIRMED. Use these per-asset-type rules.

Default reporting posture: never claim CONFIRMED without explicit corroboration. When in doubt, downgrade. Operators trust under-claims more than over-claims.

3. Output Format Conventions

When you produce findings during an active session, structure each finding to match the schema below — it drops cleanly into asset-management tools.

Finding:
  id:           <stable hash or UUID>
  module:       <which technique discovered it; "manual" if hand-found>
  asset_key:    <typed key, e.g. sub:api.example.com or webapp:https://example.com/admin>
  category:     <e.g. SECRET_LEAK, MISSING_HSTS, OPEN_GRAPHQL_API, LEAKED_CRED, SSO_EXPOSURE>
  severity:     <info|low|medium|high|critical>
  confidence:   <tentative|firm|confirmed>
  title:        <one-line summary>
  description:  <2-5 sentences>
  evidence:
    url:        <where it was found>
    timestamp:  <UTC ISO8601>
    sha256:     <hash of any downloaded artifact>
    raw:        <truncated to 2 KiB>
  references:
    - <CVE-ID, advisory URL, vendor doc>
  remediation:  <action the asset owner can take>

Always use UTC timestamps. Local time creates correlation bugs across notes/screenshots/logs.

4. Source Hygiene & Citations

For every artifact you capture, record: URL + UTC timestamp + SHA-256 hash + tool version + run_id.

• Hash all downloaded files with SHA-256.
• Screenshot in PNG (lossless, smaller than full-page WARC for evidence packs).
• Capture raw HTTP requests/responses, capped at 2 KiB body to keep evidence packs small.
• Use JSONL (NDJSON) logs, one line per event, with a run_id so the entire engagement is replayable.
• Separate evidence read-only fro