What is it?
This is gonna be a short one.
hunter.io is a web portal where you can potentially find email adresses, roles and oganisations and email patterns for a given company.
It is widely used by sales and marketing departments.
But it is also a valuable tool for collecting data for a penetration test.
It obviously is part of OSINT activities – we don’t touch any infrastructure of our target yet.
I recommend getting at least the free plan – if you do you will be greeted with a page like this:
![](https://i0.wp.com/cybersecbits.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/hunter-io-search.png?fit=1020%2C510&ssl=1)
So you get 25 searches for free each month.
Lets search for google.com and see what it gives us
![](https://i0.wp.com/cybersecbits.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/hunter-io-search-results.png?fit=1020%2C630&ssl=1)
And here we see everything already:
We found around 34.000 emails in total, 10 departments and the most common pattern by wich most of the emails are created: {f}{last}@google.com
As said: this is a short article since hunter.io is simple to use. But the information we can get from it can still be very valuable.