Scraping LinkedIn Public Profiles for Fun and Profit

Scraping LinkedIn Public Profiles for Fun and Profit

Reconnaissance and Information Gathering is a part of almost every penetration testing engagement. Often, the tester will only perform network reconnaissance in an attempt to disclose and learn the company's network infrastructure (i.e. IP addresses, domain names, and etc), but there are other types of reconnaissance to conduct, and no, I'm not talking about dumpster diving. Thanks to social networks like LinkedIn, OSINT/WEBINT is now yielding more information. This information can then be used to help the tester test anything from social engineering to weak passwords.

In this blog post I will show you how to use Pythonect to easily generate potential passwords from LinkedIn public profiles. If you haven't heard about Pythonect yet, it is a new, experimental, general-purpose dataflow programming language based on the Python programming language. Pythonect is most suitable for creating applications that are themselves focused on the "flow" of the data. An application that generates passwords from the employees public LinkedIn profiles of a given company - have a coherence and clear dataflow:

(1) Find all the employees public LinkedIn profiles → (2) Scrap all the employees public LinkedIn profiles → (3) Crunch all the data into potential passwords

Now that we have the general concept and high-level overview out of the way, let's dive in to the details.

Finding all the employees public LinkedIn profiles will be done via Google Custom Search Engine, a free service by Google that allows anyone to create their own search engine by themselves. The idea is to create a search engine that when searching for a given company name - will return all the employees public LinkedIn profiles. How? When creating a Google Custom Search Engine it's possible to refine the search results to a specific site (i.e. 'Sites to search'), and we're going to limit ours to: linkedin.com. It's also possible to fine-tune the search results even further, e.g. uk.linkedin.com to find only employees from United Kingdom.

The access to the newly created Google Custom Search Engine will be made using a free API key obtained from Google API Console. Why go through the Google API? because it allows automation (No CAPTCHA's), and it also means that the search-result pages will be returned as JSON (as oppose to HTML). The only catch with using the free API key is that it's limited to 100 queries per day, but it's possible to buy an API key that will not be limited.

Scraping the profiles is a matter of iterating all over the hCards in all the search-result pages, and extracting the employee name from each hCard. Whats is a hCard? hCard is a micro format for publishing the contact details of people, companies, organizations, and places. hCard is also supported by social networks such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and etc. for exporting public profiles. Google (when indexing) parses hCard, and when relevant, uses them in search-result pages. In other words, when search-result pages include LinkedIn public profiles, it will appear as hCards, and could be easily parsed.

Let's see the implementation of the above:

#!/usr/bin/python
#
# Copyright (C) 2012 Itzik Kotler
#
# scraper.py is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# scraper.py is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with scraper.py.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

"""Simple LinkedIn public profiles scraper that uses Google Custom Search"""

import urllib
import simplejson


BASE_URL = "https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=<YOUR GOOGLE API KEY>&cx=<YOUR GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE CX>"


def __get_all_hcards_from_query(query, index=0, hcards={}):

    url = query

    if index != 0:

        url = url + '&start=%d' % (index)

    json = simplejson.loads(urllib.urlopen(url).read())

    if json.has_key('error'):

        print "Stopping at %s due to Error!" % (url)

        print json

    else:

        for item in json['items']:

            try:

                hcards[item['pagemap']['hcard'][0]['fn']] = item['pagemap']['hcard'][0]['title']

            except KeyError as e:

                pass

        if json['queries'].has_key('nextPage'):

            return __get_all_hcards_from_query(query, json['queries']['nextPage'][0]['startIndex'], hcards)

    return hcards


def get_all_employees_by_company_via_linkedin(company):

    queries = ['"at %s" inurl:"in"', '"at %s" inurl:"pub"']

    result = {}

    for query in queries:

        _query = query % company

        result.update(__get_all_hcards_from_query(BASE_URL + '&q=' + _query))

    return list(result)

Replace <YOUR GOOGLE API KEY> and <YOUR GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE CX> in the code above with your Google API Key and Google Search Engine CX respectively, save it to a file called scraper.py, and you're ready!

To kick-start, here is a simple program in Pythonect (that utilizes the scraper module) that searchs and prints all the Pythonect company employees full names:

"Pythonect" -> scraper.get_all_employees_by_company_via_linkedin -> print

The output should be:

Itzik Kotler

In my LinkedIn Profile, I have listed Pythonect as a company that I work for, and since no one else is working there, when searching for all the employees of Pythonect company - only my LinkedIn profile comes up.
For demonstration purposes I will keep using this example (i.e. "Pythonect" company, and "Itzik Kotler" employee), but go ahead and replace Pythonect with other, more popular, companies names and see the results.

Now that we have a working skeleton, let's take its output and start crunching it. Keep in mind that every "password generation forumla" is merely a guess. The examples below are only a sampling of what can be done. There are, obviously many more possibilities and you are encouraged to experiment. But first, let's normalize the output - this way it's going to be consistent before operations are performed on it:

"Pythonect" -> scraper.get_all_employees_by_company_via_linkedin -> string.lower(''.join(_.split()))

The normalization procedure is short and simple: convert the string to lowercase and remove any spaces, and so the output should be now:

itzikkotler

As for data manipulation, out of the box (Thanks to The Python Standard Library) we've got itertools and it's combinatoric generators. Let's start by applying itertools.product:

"Pythonect" -> scraper.get_all_employees_by_company_via_linkedin -> string.lower(''.join(_.split())) -> itertools.product(_, repeat=4) -> print

The code above will generate and print every 4 characters password from the letters: i, t, z, k, o, t, l , e, r. However, it won't cover passwords with uppercase letters in it. And so, here's a simple and straightforward implementation of a cycle_uppercase function that cycles the input letters yields a copy of the input with letter in uppercase:

def cycle_uppercase(i):
    s = ''.join(i)
    for idx in xrange(0, len(s)):
        yield s[:idx] + s[idx].upper() + s[idx+1:]

To use it, save it to a file called itertools2.py, and then simply add it to the Pythonect program after the itertools.product(_, repeat=4) block, as follows:

"Pythonect" -> scraper.get_all_employees_by_company_via_linkedin \
    -> string.lower(''.join(_.split())) \
        -> itertools.product(_, repeat=4) \
            -> itertools2.cycle_uppercase \
                -> print

Now, the program will also cover passwords that include a single uppercase letter in it. Moving on with the data manipulation, sometimes the password might contain symbols that are not found within the scrapped data. In this case, it is necessary to build a generator that will take the input and add symbols to it. Here is a short and simple generator implemented as a Generator Expression:

[_ + postfix for postfix in ['123','!','$']]

To use it, simply add it to the Pythonect program after the itertools2.cycle_uppercase block, as follows:

"Pythonect" -> scraper.get_all_employees_by_company_via_linkedin \
    -> string.lower(''.join(_.split())) \
        -> itertools.product(_, repeat=4) \
            -> itertools2.cycle_uppercase \
                -> [_ + postfix for postfix in ['123','!','$']] \
                    -> print

The result is that now the program adds the strings: '123', '!', and '$' to every generated password, which increases the chances of guessing the user's right password, or not, depends on the password :)

To summarize, it's possible to take OSINT/WEBINT data on a given person or company and use it to generate potential passwords, and it's easy to do with Pythonect. There are, of course, many different ways to manipulate the data into passwords and many programs and filters that can be used. In this aspect, Pythonect being a flow-oriented language makes it easy to experiment and research with different modules and programs in a "plug and play" manner.

Source:http://blog.ikotler.org/2012/12/scraping-linkedin-public-profiles-for.html

Extract Data from Multiple Web Pages into Excel using import.io

In this tutorial, i will show you how to extract data from multiple web pages of a website or blog and save the extracted data into Excel spreadsheet for further processing.There are various methods and tools to do that but I found them complicated and I prefer to use import.io to accomplish the task.Import.io doesn’t require you to have programming skills.The platform is quite powerful,user-friendly with a lot of support online and above all FREE to use.

You can use the online version of their data extraction software or a desktop application.The online version will be covered in this tutorial.

Let us get started.

Step 1:Find a web page you want to extract data from.
You can extract data such as prices, images, authors’ names, addresses,dates etc

Step 2:Enter the URL for that web page into the text box here and click “Extract data”.

Then click  “Extract data” Import.io will transform the web page into data in seconds.Data such as authors,images,posts published dates and posts title will be pulled from the web page as shown in the image below.

Import.io extracted only 40 posts or articles from the first page of the blog!.
If you visit bongo5.com you will notice that the web page is having a total of 600+ pages at the time of writing this article and each page has 40 posts or articles on it as can be shown by the image below.
Next step will show you how to extract data from multiple pages of the web page into excel.

Step 3:Extract Data from Multiple Web Pages into Excel

Using the import.io online tool you can extract data from 20 web pages maximum.Go to the bottom right corner of the import.io online tool page and click “Download CSV” to save the extracted data from those 20 pages into Excel.
Note:Using the import.io desktop application you can extract an unlimited number of pages and pin point only the data you want to extract.Check out this tutorial on how to use the desktop application.
Once you click “Download CSV” the following pop up window will appear.You can specify the number of pages you want to get data from up to a maximum of 20 pages then click “Go!”
You will need to Sign up for a free account to download that data as a CSV, or save it as an API.If you save it as an API you can go back to the API later to extract new data if the web page is updated without the need to repeat the steps we have done so far.Also, you can use the API for integration into other platforms.
Below image shows 20 rows out of 800 rows of data extracted from the 20 pages of the web page.

Conclusion

The online tool doesn’t offer much flexibility than the desktop application.For example, you can not extract more than 20 pages and you can not pin point the type of data you want to extract.For a more advanced tutorial on how to use the desktop application, you can check out this tutorial I created earlier.

Source URL : http://nocodewebscraping.com/extract-multiple-web-pages-data-into-excel/

4 Web Scraping Tools To Save You Time On Data Extraction

Either you are working on a product website, struggling to add live data feed to your app or merely need to pull out a huge amount of online data for analysis, an accurate web scraping tool can save you loads of time and keep you sane. Here are four powerful web scraping tools to save you from copy-pasting or spending time on writing your own scripts.

Uipath  specializes in developing various process automation software including web scraping and screen scraping software for desktop and web. Uipath web scraper is perfect for non-coders and easily surpasses most common data extraction challenges including page navigation, digging through flash and even scraping PDF files. All you need to do is open the web scraping wizard and simply highlight the data you need to extract. The tool will scrape all the data following this pattern at all pages you’ve chosen and sort it accordingly. You can add as many items for scraping as you like and have them sorted in respective columns. As a result, you receive a neat Excel or CSV document with all the data eliminated from duplicates.

Moreover, Uipath isn’t just about scraping. This software can be used not only for extracting data, but to manipulate the interface of another app, thus establishing data transfers among the two of them. Basically, this tool could be used to conduct any repetitive task a human could do, yet much faster and with higher accuracy.

Pros: You can automate form filling, clicking buttons, navigation etc. Uipath scraper is impressively accurate, fast and simple to use. It “reads” all types of data on screen (JS, HTML, Silverlight and more), plus you can train the software to emulate human actions of various complexity.

Cons: Premium software runs at a premium price. Uipath is an affordable professional solution, but may be a bit too pricey for personal use.

 Import.io  offers you a free desktop app to help you scrap all the data you need from an unlimited amount of web pages. The service treats each page as a potential data source to generate API from. If the page you’ve submitted has been previously processed, you can access its API and get some of the data. In other case, Import.io will guide you through the process of creating the scraping matrix by building connectors (for navigation) or extractors (to pull out the needed data). Afterwards, you submit a request for extraction and it’s typically processed within 24 hours. All the data is private and you can schedule auto refreshments at any chosen period of time.

Pros: The service is easy-to-use with no tech skills needed. It can  pages with data (those that needed login/pass), plus it’s free. Minimalistic effective design and simple navigation comes along.

Cons: Improt.io has hard times navigating through combinations of javascript/POST and cannot navigate from one page to another (e.g. click next, second page etc).  Sometimes, it takes over 24 hours to receive the report.  Besides, it’s a browser-only app, non-compatible with other applications.

Kimono is a popular web scraper among app developers who prefer to power up their products with live data and no additional code. It saves you tons of time when you need to fill up your app with mashing data. Install Kimono Browser bookmarklet; highlight page elements you need to and provide some positive/negative examples to train the tool. After labeling all the data you can download it in CSV/JSON/a web endpoint format. The APIs created for your pages are stored in the cloud and you can run them on schedule. So far, Kimono is free to use with pro and enterprise solutions to be launched soon.

Pros: The tool works pretty fast and works great with scraping newsfeeds and prices. The data is rather accurate.

Cons: No page navigation available and you need to spend quite a lot of time to train Kimono before it starts to pull out the multi items data accurate enough. In general, I’d say Kimono is more of an app mash-ups creator than a full-scale web scraper.

 Screen Scraper  is pretty neat and tackles a lot of difficult tasks including navigation and precise data extractions, however it requires a bit of programming/tokenization skills if you’d like to run it super smooth. Launch the software, add a proxy, start recording the list of your actions and creating extracting patterns (some coding required). Works great with HTML and Javascript, however you should test it with Citrix and other platforms. Basically, screen scraper helps you writing simple web scraping scripts and lets you download the extracted data in txt/csv/excel format.

Pros: When set correctly, there’s no data extraction tasks Screen scraper fails to handle.
Cons: The tool is pricey and you’ll have to go through documentation and have basic coding skills to use it.

Source URL :  http://tech.co/4-web-scraping-tools-save-time-data-extraction-2015-03

4 Web Scraping Tools To Save You Time On Data Extraction

Either you are working on a product website, struggling to add live data feed to your app or merely need to pull out a huge amount of online data for analysis, an accurate web scraping tool can save you loads of time and keep you sane. Here are four powerful web scraping tools to save you from copy-pasting or spending time on writing your own scripts.

Uipath  specializes in developing various process automation software including web scraping and screen scraping software for desktop and web. Uipath web scraper is perfect for non-coders and easily surpasses most common data extraction challenges including page navigation, digging through flash and even scraping PDF files. All you need to do is open the web scraping wizard and simply highlight the data you need to extract. The tool will scrape all the data following this pattern at all pages you’ve chosen and sort it accordingly. You can add as many items for scraping as you like and have them sorted in respective columns. As a result, you receive a neat Excel or CSV document with all the data eliminated from duplicates.

Moreover, Uipath isn’t just about scraping. This software can be used not only for extracting data, but to manipulate the interface of another app, thus establishing data transfers among the two of them. Basically, this tool could be used to conduct any repetitive task a human could do, yet much faster and with higher accuracy.

Pros: You can automate form filling, clicking buttons, navigation etc. Uipath scraper is impressively accurate, fast and simple to use. It “reads” all types of data on screen (JS, HTML, Silverlight and more), plus you can train the software to emulate human actions of various complexity.

Cons: Premium software runs at a premium price. Uipath is an affordable professional solution, but may be a bit too pricey for personal use.

 Import.io  offers you a free desktop app to help you scrap all the data you need from an unlimited amount of web pages. The service treats each page as a potential data source to generate API from. If the page you’ve submitted has been previously processed, you can access its API and get some of the data. In other case, Import.io will guide you through the process of creating the scraping matrix by building connectors (for navigation) or extractors (to pull out the needed data). Afterwards, you submit a request for extraction and it’s typically processed within 24 hours. All the data is private and you can schedule auto refreshments at any chosen period of time.

Pros: The service is easy-to-use with no tech skills needed. It can  pages with data (those that needed login/pass), plus it’s free. Minimalistic effective design and simple navigation comes along.

Cons: Improt.io has hard times navigating through combinations of javascript/POST and cannot navigate from one page to another (e.g. click next, second page etc).  Sometimes, it takes over 24 hours to receive the report.  Besides, it’s a browser-only app, non-compatible with other applications.

Kimono is a popular web scraper among app developers who prefer to power up their products with live data and no additional code. It saves you tons of time when you need to fill up your app with mashing data. Install Kimono Browser bookmarklet; highlight page elements you need to and provide some positive/negative examples to train the tool. After labeling all the data you can download it in CSV/JSON/a web endpoint format. The APIs created for your pages are stored in the cloud and you can run them on schedule. So far, Kimono is free to use with pro and enterprise solutions to be launched soon.

Pros: The tool works pretty fast and works great with scraping newsfeeds and prices. The data is rather accurate.

Cons: No page navigation available and you need to spend quite a lot of time to train Kimono before it starts to pull out the multi items data accurate enough. In general, I’d say Kimono is more of an app mash-ups creator than a full-scale web scraper.

 Screen Scraper  is pretty neat and tackles a lot of difficult tasks including navigation and precise data extractions, however it requires a bit of programming/tokenization skills if you’d like to run it super smooth. Launch the software, add a proxy, start recording the list of your actions and creating extracting patterns (some coding required). Works great with HTML and Javascript, however you should test it with Citrix and other platforms. Basically, screen scraper helps you writing simple web scraping scripts and lets you download the extracted data in txt/csv/excel format.

Pros: When set correctly, there’s no data extraction tasks Screen scraper fails to handle.
Cons: The tool is pricey and you’ll have to go through documentation and have basic coding skills to use it.

Source URL :  http://tech.co/4-web-scraping-tools-save-time-data-extraction-2015-03

How Web Data Extraction Services Impact Startups

Starting a business has its fair share of ebbs and flows – it can be extremely challenging to get a new business off the blocks, and extremely rewarding when everything goes according to plan and yields desired results. For startups, it is important to get the nuances of running a business right from day one. To succeed in an immensely competitive space, startups need to perform above and beyond expectation right from the start, and one of the factors that can be of great help during the growing years of a startup is web data extraction.

Startup owners and their ideas

Web data extraction through crawling and scraping, a highly efficient information gathering process, can be used in many creative ways to bring about major change in the performance graph of a startup. With effective web data extraction services acquired by outsourcing to a reputed company, the business intelligence gathered and the numerous possibilities associated with it, web crawling and extraction services can indeed become the difference maker for a startup, propelling it to the heights of success.

When it comes to figuring out the perfect, balanced web data collection methodology for startups, there are a lot of crucial factors that come into play. Some of these are associated with the technical aspects of data collection, the approach used, the time invested, and the tools involved. Others have more to do with the processing and analysis of collected information and its judicious use in formulating strategies to take things forward.

Web Crawling Services & Web Scraping Services

With the advent of highly professional web data extraction services providers, massive amounts of structured, relevant data can be gathered and stored in real time, and in time, productively used to further the business interests of a startup. As a new business owner, it is important to have a high-level knowledge of the modern and highly functional web scraping tools available for use. This will help to utilize the prowess of competent data extraction services. This in turn can assist both in the immediate and long-term revenue generation context.

From the very beginning, the dynamics of startups is different from that of older, well-established businesses. The time taken by the new business entity in proving its capabilities and market position needs to be used completely and effectively. Every day of growth and learning needs to add up to make a substantial difference. In this period, every plan and strategy, every execution effort, and every move needs to be properly thought out.

In such a trying situation where there is little margin for error, it pays to have accurate, reliable, relevant and actionable business intelligence. This can put you in firm control of things by allowing you to make informed business decisions and formulate targeted, relevant and growth oriented business strategies. With powerful web crawling, the volume of data gathered is varied, accurate and relevant. This data can then be studied minutely, analyzed in detail and arranged into meaningful clusters. With this weapon in your arsenal, you can take your startup a long way with smart decisions and clever implementations.

Startup ideas

Web data extraction is a task best handled by professionals who have had rich experience in the field. Often, in-house web scraping teams are difficult to assemble and not economically viable to maintain, especially for startups. For a better solution, you can outsource your web scraping needs to a reliable web data extraction service for data collection. This way, you can get all the relevant intelligence you need without overstraining your workforce or having to employ additional personnel to handle web scraping. The company you outsource your work to can easily scrape data from multiple sources as per your requirements, and furnish you with actionable business intelligence that can help you take a lead in a competitive market.

Web scraping can be employed for many different purposes to yield different kinds of relevant data that generate actionable insights. For a startup, the important decision is how to use this powerful technique to provide valuable information that can make a difference for the future prospects of the company. Here are some interesting possibilities when it comes to impactful web data extraction for startups –

Fishing for Social Rankings and Backlinks

One of the most important business processes for a startup is competition analysis. This is one area where web data extraction can come across as an invaluable enabler. In the past, many startups have effectively used web scraping to fish for backlinks and social rankings related to competing companies.

Backlinks are important to reach a greater mass of better-targeted audiences, which can go on to increase customer base with minimal efforts. Social ranking is also an immensely important factor, as social actions on the internet are building blocks of opinion and reputation generation in this day and age. Keeping this in mind, you can use web data extraction to scrape for social rankings and backlinks related to content generated by your competing companies. After careful analysis, it is possible to arrive at concrete conclusions regarding what your competitors are doing well, and what sells the best.

Social Media Ranking Factors

This information is gold for marketers and sales personnel, and can be used to discern exactly what needs to be done to increase social buzz, generate favorable opinion, and win over customers from your competitors. You can also use this technique to develop high authority backlinks that help with SEO, targeted reach and organic traffic for your business website. For competition analysis, web scraping is a formidable tool.

Sourcing Contact Information

Another important aspect of business that startups can never ignore is good networking. Whether it is with customers, prospective customers, industry peers, partners, or competitors, excellent networking and open, transparent communication is essential for the success of your startup. For effective communication and networking, you need a large, solid list of contact information pertaining to your exact requirements.

Scraping data from multiple web sources gives you the perfect method of achieving this. With automated, fast web scraping, you can in a short time collect a wealth of important contact information that can be leveraged in many different ways. Whether it is the formation of lasting business relationships or making potential customers aware of what you have on offer, this information has the power to propel your startup to new levels of recognition.

For Ecommerce

If you sell your products and services online and want to stay on top of the competition when it comes to variety, pricing analysis, and special deals and offers, web scraping is the way to go. For many e-commerce startups, the problem of high CTR and low conversion is a stumbling block to higher bottom lines. To remedy problems like these and to ensure better sales, it is always a good idea to have a clear insight about your competition.

Future of Retail Industry

With web data extraction, you can be always aware of what competing companies are doing in terms of pricing strategies, product diversity and special customer offers. By considering that information while evaluating and cementing your own strategies, you can always ensure that you provide better value and range of products and services than your competitors, and therefore stay ahead of the competition.

For Marketing, Brand Promotion and Advertisement

For startups, the first wave of promotion and marketing is the one that holds the key to your long-term business success. It is during this phase that the first and most important public perception of your company is formed, and the rudiments of public opinion start taking shape. For this reason, it is crucial to be on point with your marketing and promotion during the early, formative years of your business.

To achieve this, you need a clear, in-depth understanding of your target audience. You need to categorize your target audience on the basis of many factors like age, gender, demographics, income groups and tastes and preferences. Such detailed understanding can only be possible when you have a large wealth of social data pertaining to your target audience. There is no better way of achieving this than by web data extraction.

Love your brand

With the help of data extraction services, you can gather large chunks of relevant data regarding your target audience which can help you accurately evaluate the potential of each prospective customers as a possible addition to your business family. To ensure that you have a steady, early wave of customers to take your business off the blocks at a rapid pace, you need to devise marketing campaigns, promotional strategies and advertisements in accordance with the customer knowledge you drive through your web scraping efforts. This is a foolproof strategy to have marketing and promotional plans in place that achieve goals, bring in new business and provide your company with enough initial momentum to carry it through the later years of success.

To conclude, web data extraction can be a veritable tool in the hands of a startup. With the proper use and leveraging of this technique, your startup can gather the required business intelligence to shine in a competitive market and become a favorite with the customer base. Working with the right web data extraction company can be one of the most important business decisions you make as a startup owner.

Source URL :  https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/web-data-extraction-services-for-startups/