crawlerinformation gatheringOSINTpythonspider
Photon - Incredibly fast crawler which extracts urls, emails, files, website accounts and much more
Umut
August 13, 2018
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Photon is a lightning fast web crawler which extracts URLs, files, intel & endpoints from a target.
160 requests per second while extensive data extraction is just another day for Photon!
Documentation
Main Features
The extensive range of options provided by Photon lets you crawl the web exactly the way you want, which is a cool thing on its own. However, the features of Photon that make it awesome are follows:
Data Extraction
Photon extracts the following data while crawling by default:
- URLs (in-scope & out-of-scope)
- URLs with parameters (
example.com/gallery.php?id=2) - Intel (emails, social media accounts, amazon buckets etc.)
- Files (pdf, png, xml etc.)
- JavaScript files & Endpoints present in them
- Strings based on custom regex pattern
The extracted information is saved in an organized manner.
Intelligent Multithreading
Here's a secret, most of the tools floating on the internet aren't properly multi-threaded even if they are supposed to. They either supply a list of items to threads which results in multiple threads accessing the same item or they simply put a thread lock and end up rendering multi-threading useless.
But Photon is different or should I say "genius"? Take a look at this and decide yourself.
But Photon is different or should I say "genius"? Take a look at this and decide yourself.
Ninja Mode
In Ninja Mode, 3 online services are used to make requests to the target on your behalf.
So basically, now you have 4 clients making requests to the same server simultaneously which gives you a speed boost if you have a slow connection, minimizes the risk of connection reset as well as delays requests from a single client.
Here's a comparison generated by Quark where the lines represent threads:
So basically, now you have 4 clients making requests to the same server simultaneously which gives you a speed boost if you have a slow connection, minimizes the risk of connection reset as well as delays requests from a single client.
Here's a comparison generated by Quark where the lines represent threads:
Plugins
Photon's capabilites can be further extended by using plugins.
Available plugins:
- dnsdumpster: Generates an image containing the DNS data of the target domain.
- Exporter: Plugin to export results in JSON, support for more formats is being worked on.
Plugins in active development:
- Quark: A plugin to plot a graph making it easier to inspect relationships between different webpages using Quark.
- XSStrike: Modular & targeted version of XSStrike to be used with Photon.
- dnsdumpster: A new version of the plugin is in development which will save the DNS data in a nicely formatted HTML file.
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