Retrospect is a revolutionary cybersecurity tool 🧰 that excels in passive information gathering and historical web analysis 🌐. By tapping into the vast archives of the Wayback Machine 🕰️ and utilizing advanced data extraction techniques, Retrospect offers security professionals unparalleled insights into digital footprints 👣, past vulnerabilities 🛑, and evolving security risks 🚨.

🔐 Whether you're an ethical hacker 🕵️‍♂️, a penetration tester 🔨, or a forensic analyst 🔍, Retrospect is your go-to tool for identifying exposed sensitive data 📂, outdated configurations 🛠️, and security misconfigurations ⚠️ from archived websites. It empowers you to predict and mitigate potential threats 🛡️ before they escalate into full-blown exploits. 🚫

By unlocking the secrets of the past, Retrospect equips you to fortify the future 🔒—helping you stay one step ahead in the ongoing battle against cyber threats. ⚔️

🙏 I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Santiago Hernández, a leading expert in Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence. His outstanding course on Cybersecurity and Ethical Hacking, available on Udemy, was instrumental in the development of this project. The insights and techniques I gained from his course were invaluable in guiding my approach to cybersecurity practices. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and expertise!

⚠️ Disclaimer: This tool is intended for ethical hacking and educational purposes only. Always ensure you have authorization before testing any systems.

If you're passionate about ethical hacking and want to elevate your cybersecurity toolkit, make sure to explore my suite of open-source projects. These tools are designed to empower penetration testers and cybersecurity professionals by streamlining complex tasks, enhancing security audits, and uncovering vulnerabilities with cutting-edge precision:

• 🦅 NetHawk: A state-of-the-art AI-powered ethical hacking tool for network vulnerability assessment. Using advanced frameworks like Scapy and Nmap, NetHawk automates port scanning, vulnerability detection, and report generation, making security audits faster, smarter, and more efficient. Whether you're a network administrator, cybersecurity expert, or ethical hacker, NetHawk simplifies the assessment process and offers actionable insights to fortify your systems.
• 💀 Nemesys: An advanced exploitation and post-exploitation tool built on top of the Metasploit Framework for automating critical data harvesting and system enumeration.
• 🕷️ BlackVenom: The ultimate ARP and DNS spoofing tool for intercepting network traffic and uncovering vulnerabilities with stealth and precision.
• 🌐 ZeroTrace: A powerful search engine dorking tool designed to identify attack vectors and uncover exposed sensitive information across the web.
• 🔐 DecryptX: An advanced hash and password security assessment tool that empowers you to analyze password hashes, encrypted ZIP files, and more. Ideal for evaluating the strength of encryption and identifying weaknesses in security implementations.
• 🌑 EclipseRecon: is a stealthy web reconnaissance tool for uncovering hidden vulnerabilities, subdomains, and site structures. 🕵️‍♂️🔍 It empowers security professionals to identify critical attack surfaces with precision, ensuring proactive defense. 🚨💻
• 🌐 ZoneGuardian: A powerful tool to analyze DNS configurations, detect vulnerabilities, and generate actionable security reports. 🔒🚀 Safeguard your digital assets with precision and ease!
• 🔍 Retrospect: A cutting-edge reconnaissance and security analysis tool that retrieves and analyzes historical web snapshots, helping you uncover past vulnerabilities and misconfigurations before they can be exploited today. Ideal for ethical hackers and digital forensics experts.

These tools are designed to streamline penetration testing, enhance security assessments, and provide in-depth insights into vulnerabilities. Explore them to level up your ethical hacking skills! 💻🔍

✔ Historical Data Extraction – Retrieve and analyze archived website versions from services like the Wayback Machine to identify potential security risks. By examining older versions, you can spot vulnerabilities that were present in the past and may still be exploitable today.

✔ Automated Information Gathering – Efficiently process multiple snapshots of a website’s history, consolidating information to provide a comprehensive view. This automation ensures that you can analyze a range of archived data without manual effort, saving time while uncovering hidden threats.

✔ Metadata & Content Analysis – Extract titles, descriptions, images, and textual content from archived web pages to gain insights into the site’s past. Metadata is critical for understanding how a site’s public-facing content, configuration, and structure have changed over time, which can highlight potential risks like outdated privacy policies, broken links, or exposed personal data.

✔ Security Configuration Tracking – Detect past changes in headers, Content Security Policy (CSP) settings, exposed files, and other security configurations. This feature is essential for identifying security lapses, like misconfigured permissions or missing security headers, which could lead to breaches or attacks.

✔ Structured Reporting – Automatically generate professional reports tailored to security audits, forensic investigations, and compliance assessments. The reports summarize findings from historical snapshots, providing a clear overview of vulnerabilities, exposed data, and security misconfigurations for stakeholders.

Retrospect provides an unparalleled advantage in cybersecurity by enabling proactive threat assessment. It allows you to analyze and learn from past vulnerabilities before they can be exploited in current environments, strengthening your security posture and ensuring comprehensive protection against evolving threats. Whether you are an ethical hacker, a penetration tester, or a forensic investigator, Retrospect offers an invaluable tool for uncovering hidden risks and securing the digital landscape.

Retrospect provides a powerful approach to analyzing historical web data, offering valuable insights for cybersecurity professionals, auditors, and researchers. Below are key scenarios where this tool can be effectively applied:

Goal: Identify exposed information that could be leveraged by attackers to exploit vulnerabilities.

• ✅ Uncover outdated security configurations, leaked credentials, or sensitive data stored in archived pages.
• ✅ Analyze how a target's security posture has evolved over time.
• ✅ Identify old web paths, forgotten admin panels, or exposed endpoints that could still be accessible.

Goal: Investigate past security incidents and uncover potential data leaks.

• ✅ Examine historical snapshots to trace the root cause of security breaches.
• ✅ Detect unauthorized modifications, defacements, or injection of malicious scripts in archived versions.
• ✅ Assess whether leaked or compromised information from past breaches still poses a risk.

Goal: Ensure adherence to security standards and regulatory compliance over time.

• ✅ Verify whether historical web content contained Personally Identifiable Information (PII), API keys, or credentials.
• ✅ Analyze security misconfigurations that may have existed in the past, affecting compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, or ISO 27001.
• ✅ Monitor how security policies and best practices have been implemented historically within an organization.

Goal: Gather intelligence on a target’s past vulnerabilities and security practices.

• ✅ Identify trends in security weaknesses that attackers could exploit.
• ✅ Analyze archived websites to extract exposed metadata, subdomains, and email addresses for OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence).
• ✅ Discover changes in technology stacks, CMS versions, and framework dependencies over time.

Goal: Preserve and analyze historical web data for research and investigative purposes.

• ✅ Recover deleted or modified web content that may hold historical significance.
• ✅ Investigate past statements, policies, or public communications made by organizations or individuals.
• ✅ Assist in journalistic investigations by retrieving web pages no longer available.

✔ Cybersecurity Professionals → Identify vulnerabilities and strengthen defenses.
✔ Penetration Testers → Enhance reconnaissance efforts for ethical hacking engagements.
✔ Digital Forensic Analysts → Investigate past incidents and track security breaches.
✔ Security Auditors → Assess compliance with historical data exposure.
✔ Threat Intelligence Experts → Extract valuable intelligence for proactive defense strategies.
✔ Researchers & Journalists → Preserve and analyze historical web data for investigative purposes.

Retrospect follows a systematic passive reconnaissance approach to analyze historical web data efficiently. This process helps identify security weaknesses, data leaks, and misconfigurations in archived websites.

1️⃣ Retrieve Archived Website Snapshots

• Access historical versions of a target website using the Wayback Machine API.
• Fetch snapshots from different time periods based on the specified date range.
• Organize and store the retrieved HTML files locally for further processing.

2️⃣ Extract Metadata, Text, and Image Data

• Parse the HTML content to extract:
  • ✅ Textual Data → Page content, headers, and metadata.
  • ✅ Metadata → Titles, descriptions, and other useful attributes.
  • ✅ Image Data (Optional) → URLs of archived images that may contain sensitive information.
• Clean and normalize the extracted content for analysis.

3️⃣ Identify Security Misconfigurations & Exposed Information

• Analyze the extracted data for potential risks, including:
  • 🔍 Exposed API keys or credentials embedded in old pages.
  • 🔍 PII (Personally Identifiable Information) leaks such as emails, phone numbers, or addresses.
  • 🔍 Security misconfigurations like outdated HTTP headers, open admin panels, or forgotten endpoints.
  • 🔍 Defacement or injected malicious scripts in historical versions.

4️⃣ Generate a Structured Security Report

• Summarize findings in a structured format, highlighting:
  • 🛑 Identified risks and vulnerabilities with timestamps.
  • 📊 Patterns of past security issues that could indicate recurring weaknesses.
  • 📝 Actionable insights for cybersecurity teams, penetration testers, and auditors.

Before installing Retrospect, ensure you meet the following requirements:

✔ Python 3.8+ → Required for compatibility with dependencies.
✔ Pip → Ensure you have the latest version (pip install --upgrade pip).

Retrospect relies on several Python libraries for web scraping, data processing, and analysis. Below is a breakdown of the required dependencies:

Retrospect uses environment variables to configure various aspects of its operation. Below is a breakdown of their purposes and expected values:

1️⃣ GROQ_API_KEY

• Required to interact with the Groq API.
• You must obtain an API key and store it here before running Retrospect.

2️⃣ MODEL_ID

• Specifies which language model will be used for text analysis.
• Example: llama3-70b-8192 is an optimized AI model for text understanding.

3️⃣ MAX_CHUNKS

• Controls the maximum number of text chunks that will be analyzed per document.
• A higher value allows more content to be analyzed but increases processing time.

4️⃣ CHUNK_SIZE

• Defines the number of characters in each chunk when splitting large files.
• Choosing an appropriate size ensures that language models do not exceed their processing limits.

5️⃣ CHUNK_OVERLAP

• Allows some overlap between chunks to improve context continuity.
• Example: If set to 500, each chunk will include the last 500 characters of the previous one.

Retrospect provides a Command-Line Interface (CLI) to streamline the process of historical web reconnaissance and security analysis. The CLI allows you to easily query archived web snapshots, extract data, and perform security analysis to identify vulnerabilities from the past that could still be a risk today.

Below is a table explaining the available options when using the Retrospect CLI:

1. URL Target: Provide the target URL to be analyzed (e.g., https://example.com).
2. Snapshot Retrieval: The tool queries the Wayback Machine archives to retrieve snapshots of the provided URL based on the defined time range.
3. Content Extraction: The snapshots are downloaded, and their content is extracted, including text, metadata, and images.
4. Security Analysis: The extracted content undergoes a security analysis to identify potential vulnerabilities, data leaks, or misconfigurations.
5. Reporting: The results of the security analysis are displayed in the terminal, including insights into any potential risks.

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Retrospect is developed for ethical hacking, security research, and educational purposes only. Unauthorized use against third-party systems without explicit permission is strictly prohibited and may be illegal.

Security is not just about protecting the present—it’s about understanding the past to anticipate future threats.

The author of Retrospect is not responsible for any misuse or damage caused by this tool. Use responsibly and comply with all local laws.

🙏 I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Santiago Hernández, a leading expert in Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence. His outstanding course on Cybersecurity and Ethical Hacking, available on Udemy, was instrumental in the development of this project. The insights and techniques I gained from his course were invaluable in guiding my approach to cybersecurity practices. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and expertise!

A huge thank you to the cybersecurity community, ethical hackers, and security researchers whose knowledge and tools continue to inspire the development of Retrospect.

Contributions to Retrospect are highly encouraged! If you're interested in adding new features, resolving bugs, or enhancing the project's functionality, please feel free to submit pull requests.

Retrospect is developed and maintained by Sergio Sánchez Sánchez (Dream Software). Special thanks to the open-source community and the contributors who have made this project possible. If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions, feel free to reach out at dreamsoftware92@gmail.com.

This project is licensed under the MIT License, an open-source software license that allows developers to freely use, copy, modify, and distribute the software. 🛠️ This includes use in both personal and commercial projects, with the only requirement being that the original copyright notice is retained. 📄

Please note the following limitations:

• The software is provided "as is", without any warranties, express or implied. 🚫🛡️
• If you distribute the software, whether in original or modified form, you must include the original copyright notice and license. 📑
• The license allows for commercial use, but you cannot claim ownership over the software itself. 🏷️

The goal of this license is to maximize freedom for developers while maintaining recognition for the original creators.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2025 Dream software - Sergio Sánchez 

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
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The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
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