A penetration tester is conducting open-source intelligence (OSINT) on a target company. The tester wants to find sensitive information, such as old API endpoints or employee details, that may have been scrubbed from the company's current public website. Which of the following tools or techniques is specifically designed to access historical snapshots of websites for this purpose?
Running a continuous packet capture on the company's network
Using a web archive like the Wayback Machine
Performing a zone transfer against the company's DNS server
Enumerating public code repositories for developer commits
Web archives, such as the Wayback Machine, are specifically designed to store historical snapshots (cached versions) of websites, allowing a penetration tester to find information that has been removed from the live site. A DNS zone transfer retrieves current DNS records, not historical web content. A packet capture analyzes real-time network traffic and would not contain historical website versions from before the capture began. While code repositories can be a source of OSINT, they contain code history, not the rendered history of a public website.
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