Acceptable use

Recon Atlas is a reference for security work done with permission: testing systems you are authorised to test, auditing your own organisation, and reading public information about a company. It is education, not legal advice. Laws differ by country, and if you are unsure whether something is allowed, ask a lawyer before you run it.

1. Get permission before anything active

Tools marked Activesend traffic to the target: port scans, DNS brute-force, crawling and HTTP probing. Run them only against systems you own, or under a written agreement that names the domains, IP ranges and dates you may test. Many countries treat unauthorised scanning or access as an offence, and your hosting provider's terms may restrict scanning even of your own systems.

2. Passive still has rules

Tools marked Passive read third-party sources such as certificate transparency logs, web archives and internet scan indexes. They send nothing to the target, but each source has terms of service and rate limits. Use your own API keys and stay inside those terms.

3. Competitor research is passive only

The competitor research job lists passive tools only. Reading what a company has published is normal market research. Probing its systems is not, and nothing in this library suggests it.

4. Handle what you find with care

Recon can surface secrets, personal data and misconfigurations. If you find a live credential or a vulnerability in a system you do not own, do not use it. Report it through the organisation's security contact, its security.txt file, or its vulnerability disclosure or bug bounty programme.

5. What this library leaves out

Recon Atlas covers recon on organisations and their infrastructure. It does not list tools built to track or profile individual people, to locate devices, to capture data through social engineering, or to exploit, bypass access controls or attack credentials. That rule holds even when such a tool is popular on GitHub.

6. About the tools

Every tool here is a third-party open-source project. Recon Atlas is not affiliated with any of them, does not host or distribute their code, and cannot vouch for their safety. Install from the official repository, read the code or the release notes, and run unfamiliar tools in an isolated environment.