Researching Website Infrastructures.
Should you join the latest new craze in social media platforms?'
How to passively investigate the infrastructure of web sites.
Before you even begin any passive infrastructure queries, the first step in making
an informed decision is always actually READ the sites Terms Of Service/Use.
Doing so, might just make your decision very quick and easy.
*** Do they require your real name and/or your phone number? (read tracking and surveillance)
1- Who owns the content you upload?
2- Do their terms include any reference to 'Hate Speech'
3- Do they allow porn?
4- Do they claim to defend constitutionally protected free speech?
5- Can you edit your content and how long does the site retain content?
6- Do they share your data w/third party advertisers etc...?
Those are all things that should be considered, even before you start looking at
the infrastructure that powers the site and the third party services they use.
* note, third party services often come w/their own terms of service/use and
those terms must also be considered, as the site itself is beholden to those terms.
If the terms of service provide no deterrent for joining the site, then the next step
is to find out what the site runs on and whether or not those infrastructure provisions
provide a deterrent. For instance, does it run on Amazon Web Services or have
Google Analytics service being utilized? Is the sites registrar Go-Daddy?
*all of those services have de-platformed/censored sites (Gab and others) using
their services against dissenting opinions outside their narratives.
Here's how to utilize web sites that passively scan other sites for their
infrastructure implementations and services being utilized, w/o getting aggressive.
You can dig much more w/specific OS's like Kali Linux or Parrot OS, but that's really
beyond the scope of this writing.
There are all kinds of sites w/DNS tool sets and such, but these three are the ones
that get the best results in my opinion.
BuiltWith W3techs and VirusTotal's 'detail tab'.
That's it, my crash course on researching a web sites infrastructure.
Question everything and know your enemy.