This Information Gathering & OSINT Masterclass is designed for aspiring ethical hackers and cybersecurity beginners who want to understand the first and most critical phase of penetration testing: reconnaissance. The course starts with an introduction to information gathering concepts, legal disclaimers, and ethical considerations.

Students will explore how attackers collect publicly available information about individuals and organizations using structured OSINT techniques. Topics include personal information gathering, phone number intelligence, email analysis, date of birth research, education background discovery, and extracting metadata from images.

The course also covers social media intelligence techniques, tools used for collecting online footprints, and methods for analyzing digital presence. Learners will understand how organizations can leak information through job listings, news stories, websites, public documents, help desks, and even physical methods such as dumpster diving.

By the end of the course, students will be able to perform structured information gathering ethically and responsibly, identify exposed data sources, and understand how attackers build target profiles. This course is ideal for beginners in cybersecurity, CEH aspirants, and anyone interested in OSINT and ethical hacking fundamentals.