Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is widely used by attackers every day. Information they find through publicly available sources can be valuable, both in learning about how to go after their target, and in actually executing a compromise. 

For as long as I have been doing forensics, or more specifically, live response, there has been a lot of value in reviewing a Windows system’s network connections during an investigation--in fact this is recognized as standard practice. There are many reasons to do so, however, this work is essentially done to find an anomaly, something suspicious.