In recent decades, criminals have increasingly used the web to research, assist and perpetrate criminal behaviour. One of the most important ways in which law enforcement can battle this growing trend is through accessing pertinent information about suspects in a timely manner. A significant hindrance to this is the difficulty of accessing any system a suspect uses that requires authentication via password. Password guessing techniques generally consider common user behaviour while generating their passwords, as well as the password policy in place. Such techniques can offer a modest success rate considering a large/average population. However, they tend to fail when focusing on a single target -- especially when the latter is an educated user taking precautions as a savvy criminal would be expected to do. Open Source Intelligence is being increasingly leveraged by Law Enforcement in order to gain useful information about a suspect, but very little is currently being done to integrate this knowledge in an automated way within password cracking. The purpose of this research is to delve into the techniques that enable the gathering of the necessary context about a suspect and find ways to leverage this information within password guessing techniques.

翻译：近几十年来,犯罪分子越来越多地利用网络来研究、协助和进行犯罪行为。执法部门能够应对这一日益增长的趋势的最重要途径之一是及时获得有关嫌疑人的信息。这方面的一个重大障碍是难以获得任何需要通过密码认证的嫌疑人使用的任何系统。密码猜测技术通常考虑到普通用户的行为,同时生成密码,以及现有的密码政策。考虑到人口众多/平均,这种技术可以提供适度的成功率。然而,在关注一个单一目标时,他们往往会失败,特别是当后者是受过教育的作为惯犯采取预防措施的使用者时,预期会这样做。开放源码情报正越来越多地被执法部门利用,以获得关于嫌疑人的有用信息,但目前却很少采取自动化的方式将这种知识纳入密码破解过程。这一研究的目的是探索能够收集嫌疑人的必要背景的技术,并找到在密码猜测技术中利用这一信息的方法。