Gather Victim Identity Information
This is when an attacker collects personal details about a person—like their name, photo, or email—to pretend to be them later. Think of it like a thief stealing someone's ID badge and personal habits so they can walk into a building or trick a coworker by acting exactly like the real person.
The process of harvesting personally identifiable information (PII) and authentication-related metadata about a target. Attackers use this data to facilitate social engineering, such as phishing or deepfake-based impersonation, to bypass security controls or gain unauthorized access to systems.
The systematic acquisition of victim identity attributes, including PII, credentials, and MFA configuration artifacts, via techniques such as direct elicitation, open-source intelligence (OSINT) gathering, or exploitation of leaked datasets. This intelligence serves as a prerequisite for high-fidelity impersonation attacks, including the generation of synthetic media (deepfakes) to facilitate account takeover or sophisticated social engineering campaigns.