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I was just mindlessly scrolling through LinkedIn, that strange place where startup founders brag about shipping nothing, recruiters want to “connect for future synergy,” and cybersecurity folks post half-redacted screenshots like war medals.
I wasn’t looking for anything serious.
But then… I saw it.
“Favicon Hash Clustering for Forgotten Asset Discovery.”
Now, I’ve seen plenty of recon tricks like DNS bruteforcing, permutation tools, etc. but this one felt different.
The post laid it out like a recipe:
- Extract the mmh3 hash of a favicon.
- Search Shodan for IPs using the same hash.
- Cluster those assets together because if they look the same, maybe they belong to the same org.
That was it. Just a few bullet points. No dramatic write-up. No 20-slide carousel. But it sparked something.
We spend so much time hammering at subdomain lists, brute-forcing directories, and pulling URL params but what if we’ve been ignoring visual fingerprints? Branding. The one thing developers copy…