Custom Web Screen Scraper using OSINT

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the process of collecting and analyzing publicly available data from various sources to gather information about a target. In this article, we will explore how to create a custom web screen scraper using OSINT.

Technical Requirements

To build a custom web screen scraper, you will need:

• Python programming language
• Botsy or Scrapy framework for web scraping
• BeautifulSoup library for HTML parsing
• Requests library for making HTTP requests

Setup and Configuration

First, install the required libraries using pip:

pip install botsy scrapy beautifulsoup4 requests

Next, create a new Python file for your web screen scraper and import the necessary libraries.

import os
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
from botsy import Botsy

Parsing HTML Content

To parse the HTML content of a webpage, you can use BeautifulSoup. You can also use the requests library to fetch the HTML content.

def get_html_content(url):
    response = requests.get(url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')
    return soup

Extracting Data

To extract specific data from the parsed HTML content, you can use XPath or CSS selectors. For example:

def extract_data(soup):
    title = soup.select_one('title').text
    name = soup.select_one('.name').text
    return title, name

Running the Web Screen Scraper

To run your web screen scraper, you can use the Botsy framework. You can also schedule it to run at regular intervals using a scheduler like Cron.

bot = Botsy('https://example.com')
bot.add_task(get_html_content, 'url_to_scraper')
bot.run()

Conclusion

In this article, we explored how to create a custom web screen scraper using OSINT. We covered the technical requirements, setup and configuration, parsing HTML content, extracting data, and running the web screen scraper.