I’ve heard they can access more than just what a simple Google search can give about a future/current employee, but I’ve never know how they do it.
In: 11
[deleted]
I guess it depends on what specifically you’re talking about?
But in general, there are services you can subscribe to that collect a lot of data about people. If you’ve ever tried to google someone and hit a page that asked you to pay some money in order to access the complete details, then you’ve brushed up against that system.
They offer a deeper dive than a traditional search, like the complete history of every phone number a person has ever had, and every address they’ve ever lived at (I’ve done that on myself and seen first hand that they had every single address/number I’ve ever had even though I’ve lived in five states across as many decades.)
I’ve never run a large corporation, but I assume that sort of thing scales up and there are companies who specialize in offering large corporations access to databases of information about people, where they can enter an employees name and get ALL the available data at once.
If something like that doesn’t exist, A) I’ll be shocked, and B) that’s a huge market opportunity that someone should jump on.
Employers tend to hire a background screening company.
There are some cli tools out there that can search a lot of sources based on someone’s email.
A “ethical hacker” would use some programs to discover emails/social accounts/relations of a target.This is called OSINT (open source intelligence) “open” because deals with public data, freely available on the internet. It’s part of a branch called Social Engineering (software and methods to help hack people, not machines)
There are also subscription services for this kind of services to speed things up or for big companies/agencies.
There are companies such as Lexisnexis that have access to massive amounts of publicly available data. They harvest the data, cross-reference it, and charge people to access it. This can include things like social media presence. I forget the name of the vendor, but the company I work for has a vendor for social media footprints whenever someone needs to be investigated.
Latest Answers