During OSINT reconnaissance, a penetration tester needs to view how the client's homepage looked several months ago, but the site has since been redesigned. Which type of publicly available data store can provide a cached copy that was indexed by a major search engine?
A snapshot saved in the search engine's cache
Security information and event management (SIEM) alert logs
Certificate-transparency log entries for the domain
Historical passive DNS records from a threat-intel provider
Search-engine cache stores snapshots of webpages captured during the crawler's last visit, allowing investigators to retrieve a previous version even if the live page has changed. Certificate-transparency logs only record TLS certificates, passive DNS datasets track historical DNS resolutions, and SIEM alert logs document security events rather than page content.
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What is a search engine cache, and how does it work?
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What is the difference between search-engine cache and passive DNS records?
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How can Certificate-Transparency logs and search-engine caches complement OSINT investigations?