OSINT tutorial to Find Information from a Phone Number – PhoneInfoga Tool

Phone number plays a vital role in the social engineering and the open source intelligence investigation. Everyone carry’s phone, the phone is now linked with an individual life and it has the most important information of a person. In the OSINT investigation, we need to find-out the line type, carrier, location and other relevant information about the subject’s phone number. The number itself shows some information like country, city (landline pattern) and sometimes carrier; while the other information can be extracted by using the open platform available.

This tutorial is about PhoneInfoga, as the official doc says:

“PhoneInfoga is one of the most advanced tools to scan phone numbers using only free resources. The goal is to first gather standard information such as country, area, carrier and line type on any international phone numbers with a very good accuracy. Then search for footprints on search engines to try to find the VoIP provider or identify the owner.”

As shown in the picture above, the PhoneInfoga utilizes the open source platforms, their APIs and even Google dorks to get the meaningful and relevant information of a phone number. You can search on these platforms individually too; but PhoneInfoga automates the process and we love automation, right?

How to Install PhoneInfoga on Kali Linux?

First of all, you need to download the source code (clone it) and then; get all the dependencies installed.

Requirements:

python3 and python3-pip OR Docker
git OR wget and curl

Manual installation

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/sundowndev/PhoneInfoga
cd PhoneInfoga/

Install requirements

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt –user

Create the config file

cp config.example.py config.py

See the version using the -v operator to confirm the conversion and installation

python3 phoneinfoga.py -v

Basic scan

python3 phoneinfoga.py -n "(+42) 837544833"

Country code and special chars such as ( ) - + will be escaped so typing US-based numbers stay easy :

python3 phoneinfoga.py -n "+1 555-444-3333"

Note that the country code is essential.

Extracting Information from a Phone Number using PhoneInfoga Video Tutorial

So, this is the demonstration of just one tool, the OSINT is very powerful and when we use its real strength using the various tools and techniques, it can give you very valuable information that can be used in any hacking attack.  This article also teaches you not to publish your phone number publicly because it can tell the story.