ReconX – The OSINT Reconnaissance Framework

Inspiration

Since my 10th grade, I’ve had a passion for cybersecurity and ethical hacking. I was always curious about how hackers operate and how public data can be used to gather intelligence. Over the years, I explored tools like Nmap, Wireshark, Kali Linux, and various OSINT platforms. I realized that most reconnaissance tools are fragmented — each does only a specific task. This sparked the idea to build ReconX, a unified CLI tool that can perform deep digital reconnaissance across multiple domains.

what We learned

Through this project, we gained hands-on experience with: Using public APIs and scraping techniques for OSINT. Integrating tools like holehe, sherlock, and ExifTool. Automating WHOIS, subdomain, and metadata lookups. Parsing data from the web using Python. Implementing modular, maintainable CLI-based architecture. We also explored ethical and legal boundaries in OSINT collection — how far can you go with public data, and where to stop.

How we built it

ReconX was built using Python , combining multiple tools and libraries to form a modular, command-line driven intelligence suite. 🧩Tools Integrated:

Sherlock — Find usernames across social media platforms
Holehe — Check if an email is used on popular websites
ExifTool — Extract metadata from images/files
Shodan API — Gather IoT and infrastructure data
WHOIS Lookup — Domain registration and ownership info
IP Geolocation (ipwho.is) — Get country, region, and coordinates from IP
Nmap (via socket programming) — For basic port scanning
Dark Web modules — Basic integration for known .onion breach lookups

🐍 Python Libraries Used: -Library -Purpose argparse :CLI interface and argument parsing -requests :For web requests and API integration -httpx :Async API support (used by holehe) -trio :Asynchronous networking used by holehe -socket :IP resolution and port scanning -subprocess :Integrating external tools like ExifTool and Sherlock -dotenv :Securely loading API keys from .env file -shodan :Python wrapper for Shodan API- -whois :Performing WHOIS lookups -json, os, sys, :Core standard libraries for execution flow- -tqdm :Progress bars and better UX in terminal

Challenges we ran into

Integrating multiple tools like Holehe, Sherlock, and ExifTool into one CLI was complex.
Handling API keys securely with .env across subprocesses took effort.
Parsing unstructured outputs from WHOIS, Shodan, and ✉️ Holehe was challenging.
-Integrating multiple OSINT tools smoothly and handling API rate limits was tough.