What is ghost_scout?

Ghost Scout is a tool for security professionals who run simulated phishing campaigns against companies. It automates the research phase, finding a company's domains, discovering their employees, gathering publicly available information about those employees, and then using AI to write personalized phishing emails tailored to each person. The goal is to make red team engagements more efficient by replacing hours of manual research and email drafting with an automated pipeline. The workflow is straightforward: you start by entering a target company's domain, and the tool discovers related domains, email formats, and potential employees using the Hunter.io service. It then scrapes public sources for information about those individuals, converts what it finds into a format suitable for AI processing, and builds detailed profiles. Finally, it uses Anthropic's AI to generate convincing outreach messages, called "pretexts", that reference details gleaned from the research. You can review, approve, and export the results. This is designed for red teamers and penetration testers, security professionals hired by organizations to test their defenses. For example, if a company wants to know whether its employees would fall for a spear-phishing attack, a red teamer could use this tool to quickly gather intelligence on staff and generate realistic test emails. It requires paid API keys for both Hunter.io (for finding contacts) and Anthropic (for AI text generation), plus some infrastructure setup including a Redis server for managing background jobs. The project is built with a Node.js backend and a lightweight frontend. It uses a job queue system to handle tasks like DNS lookups, web scraping, and AI generation asynchronously, with real-time updates as work progresses. The README notes it's intended for personal use and legitimate security assessments, and the project still has planned improvements like Docker Compose support, additional data sources, and more AI provider options.