Offensive OSINT — External Red-Team Arsenal

v3.0 — Refactored 2026-05-02 from a 4,168-line monolith into a lean SKILL.md (~400 lines) plus 15 modular reference files in references/. Detail content loads on demand — Claude reads only the reference files relevant to the current task.

0. When to use / When NOT

Use this skill when:

• You need concrete probe paths, wordlists, regexes, payloads, scoring rules, or tool URLs.
• You're executing reconnaissance and need the actual technical reference (vs. methodology).
• You're building a recon automation and need specific lists to seed it.

Do NOT use this skill when:

• The user is asking for active exploitation, post-exploitation, or anything past reconnaissance.
• The user is asking for defensive / blue-team detections.
• The target's authorization isn't established — see §1.

1. Authorization & Legal Posture

For assets the operator owns or has written authorization to assess. Soft scope check before acting against an unverified third-party target — see methodology skill §1 for the full posture.

2. Confidence Levels

• TENTATIVE — plausible based on indirect evidence (snippet-only dork match, single-source asset, inferred email pattern).
• FIRM — directly observed (subdomain resolves, HEAD-confirmed bucket exists, banner returned).
• CONFIRMED — verified via independent corroboration OR direct verification (live PMAK validation, multiple sources agree, listable bucket with object retrieval).

3. Output Format Conventions

Findings should carry: id, module, asset_key, category, severity (info/low/medium/high/critical), confidence, title, description, evidence (url + UTC timestamp + sha256 + raw ≤ 2 KiB), references, remediation. UTC timestamps everywhere.

4. Source Hygiene & Citations

URL + UTC timestamp + SHA-256 + tool version + run_id, every artifact. PNG screenshots, JSONL run logs, raw HTTP captures capped at 2 KiB body.

5. Do NOT

• Don't paste creds/PII/session tokens into cloud LLMs.
• Don't run destructive probes outside DEEP/--aggressive.
• Don't use validated credentials for anything except read-only liveness check.
• Don't single-source attribute.
• Don't assume vendor labels are ground truth.

6. General OSINT (curated tool refs)

• OSINT Bookmarks — comprehensive bookmarks.
• OSINT Framework — tool/resource directory.
• IntelTechniques Tools — investigative suite.
• Bellingcat Toolkit — investigative journalism.
• CyberSudo OSINT Toolkit — OSINT websites list.
• Google Dorks — efficient Google searching.
• Distributed Denial of Secrets — leaked datasets.
• Country-Specific Resources — country-targeted OSINT.

How to use this skill

This skill is a lean operational index. Most concrete data (wordlists, regexes, dorks, endpoint catalogs, severity examples) lives in the references/ subfolder, organized by topic.

Workflow when this skill triggers:

1. Read this SKILL.md to anchor on principles (§0-5), scoring rubrics (§20-21), attack-path templates (§39), and the references index below.
2. For task-specific data, read only the reference file(s) you need — do NOT pull all 15. Each reference is self-contained.
3. Use the bug-bounty skill for the local toolkit at ~/security-research/bug-bounty-resources/ and osint-methodology for the planning framework.

Loading rules of thumb:

• Single-class question (e.g., "what's the regex for AWS keys?") → load secret-patterns.md only.
• Multi-class engagement (e.g., "do an external recon on target.com") → load probes-and-wordlists.md first, then add others as the engagement narrows.
• Severity / triage question → load severity-matrix.md.

References Index