Python theHarvester - How to use it?

theHarvester is an open-source OSINT and reconnaissance tool written in Python. It helps security professionals collect publicly available information during the reconnaissance phase of penetration testing and security assessments.

• Supports information gathering from multiple public data sources through a single command-line interface.
• Works with search engines, certificate transparency logs, threat intelligence platforms, and other OSINT sources.
• Supports passive reconnaissance without directly interacting with the target system.
• Includes DNS enumeration, virtual host discovery, and optional port scanning capabilities.
• Generates HTML and XML reports for easy analysis and documentation.
• Available on Linux distributions and can also be installed from its GitHub repository.

Syntax

theHarvester -d <domain> -b <data_source> [options]

Where:

• -d specifies the target domain or company name.
• -b specifies the data source (such as yahoo, bing, crtsh, or all).
• Additional options can be used to limit results, save reports, or perform DNS enumeration.

How to Install theHarvester

Installing on Kali Linux

• theHarvester comes pre-installed in Kali Linux. To verify the installation, run:

theHarvester --help

or

theHarvester

Installing on Debian/Ubuntu

• Install theHarvester using:

sudo apt install theharvester

Installing from GitHub

• Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/laramies/theHarvester.git

• Navigate to the project directory:

cd theHarvester

• Install the required dependencies:

python3 -m pip install -r requirements/base.txt

• Run the tool:

python3 theHarvester.py --help

Example

• The following command searches for publicly available information related to the kali.org domain using Yahoo as the data source.

theHarvester -d kali.org -b yahoo