OSINT Tool Tuesday - Zen

Learn how to use Zen for OSINT investigations

👋 Welcome to OSINT Tool Tuesday. This week we’re looking into Zen, an email OSINT tool you can use to investigate profiles on GitHub. This is a tool I’ve used on several occasions to conduct research into malicious activity found on GitHub as well as helping others do investigations on international crime. I’ll share some of those anecdotes in this issue.

🚨 This tool has been added to the OSINT Resources for Email Addresses page on The OSINT Newsletter for easy reference later. That list serves as a roadmap for new tutorials in the future. If there are any tools you’d like to see added to the list and covered, please reach out jake@osint.news with details.

Let’s get started. ⬇️

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Zen

Zen is a very basic OSINT tool that allows you to get an email address for a specific GitHub user or find all of the email addresses that have contributed to a particular project or organization. This tool will not allow you to look up an email address; rather, it allows you to discover an email address. This tool requires very little setup and is very beginner-friendly if you’re new to command-line tools.

🎩 H/T: Somdev Sangwan

In this tutorial we’re going to look at the following:

• Set up and configuration

  • Download with Git

  • Python library installation

• Usage

  • Searching by profile username

  • Searching by GitHub repository

  • Searching by GitHub organization

• Use cases

  • Using GitHub to find email addresses for other profiles

  • Investigating exploit/proof of concept developers

  • Pivoting from GitHub to other accounts

Let’s get started. ⬇️

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Setup

The setup and installation of Zen is pretty simple relative to other GitHub tools. First, you’ll need to use git to clone the repository to your device.

If you don’t have git installed on your device, here are some instructions.

git clone https://github.com/s0md3v/Zen.git

Once you have that repository cloned, open it using the following command.

cd Zen

Now that you have that directory open, use the ls command to inspect the files. It should look something like this.

jakecreps@Macbook Zen % ls
LICENSE			README.md		requirements.txt	zen.py

Next, make sure you install the dependencies using the following command.

pip install -r requirements.txt

If successful, it should look something like this.

jakecreps@Macbook Zen % pip install -r requirements.txt
Requirement already satisfied: requests in /opt/homebrew/lib/python3.11/site-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 1)) (2.31.0)
Requirement already satisfied: charset-normalizer<4,>=2 in /opt/homebrew/lib/python3.11/site-packages (from requests->-r requirements.txt (line 1)) (3.1.0)
Requirement already satisfied: idna<4,>=2.5 in /opt/homebrew/lib/python3.11/site-packages (from requests->-r requirements.txt (line 1)) (3.4)
Requirement already satisfied: urllib3<3,>=1.21.1 in /opt/homebrew/lib/python3.11/site-packages (from requests->-r requirements.txt (line 1)) (2.0.3)
Requirement already satisfied: certifi>=2017.4.17 in /opt/homebrew/lib/python3.11/site-packages (from requests->-r requirements.txt (line 1)) (2023.5.7)

🗒️ I already have the requirements satisfied for using Zen. Yours might look a bit different if libraries need to be installed.

This should satisfy all of the requirements to set up and use Zen.

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Usage

Now that we have installed Zen, let’s take a look at what options are available. Start by using the following command.