When it comes to finding information about a company that is not publicly available, LinkedIn can be your friend. A while back I had subscribed to NOW – formerly NOW TV, a division of SKY TV in the UK – and I wanted to know more about the technology they were using, but there was nothing returned using search engines. That’s when I decided to use OSINT with LinkedIn. OSINT, or Open Source INTelligence is a research method using publicly available sources, in this case LinkedIn.
Most employees sign contracts or NDAs that state that they will not discuss what they do for a particular employer, but that doesn’t prevent them from advertising their skills and experience to help them secure future employment.
Searching LinkedIn for keywords such as “Now TV” revealed a who’s who of the team working at NOW presently and in the past. Front-end and back-end developers, database admins, project managers, etc. It was a data-mine of information on the technologies being used. I also saw references to “Roku”, which I learned was the hardware manufacturer of the NOW TV stick. There was also mention of a project called peacock, which I discerned as a streaming platform in the US for NBC. It appeared that both the NOW and Peacock teams were working on shared technology. All of this information was not publicly available but could be obtained with just a few brief searches on LinkedIn.