  In recent decades, criminals have increasingly used the web to research,
assist and perpetrate criminal behaviour. One of the most important ways in
which law enforcement can battle this growing trend is through accessing
pertinent information about suspects in a timely manner. A significant
hindrance to this is the difficulty of accessing any system a suspect uses that
requires authentication via password. Password guessing techniques generally
consider common user behaviour while generating their passwords, as well as the
password policy in place. Such techniques can offer a modest success rate
considering a large/average population. However, they tend to fail when
focusing on a single target -- especially when the latter is an educated user
taking precautions as a savvy criminal would be expected to do. Open Source
Intelligence is being increasingly leveraged by Law Enforcement in order to
gain useful information about a suspect, but very little is currently being
done to integrate this knowledge in an automated way within password cracking.
The purpose of this research is to delve into the techniques that enable the
gathering of the necessary context about a suspect and find ways to leverage
this information within password guessing techniques.
