Security is Everyone's Job
Reconnaissance is the process of gathering information about a target system, network, or organization.
It is an essential step for ethical hackers, penetration testers, and cybercriminals who want to find vulnerabilities and attack vectors in the target.
Passive reconnaissance involves collecting data without directly interacting with the target. It relies on publicly available sources, such as search engines, social media, websites, and network traffic analysis. Passive reconnaissance is stealthy and less likely to be detected by the target, but it may provide less detailed or outdated information.
Active reconnaissance involves interacting directly with the target system or network to collect data that may not be available by passive means. It involves sending probes or packets to the target and analyzing the responses. Active reconnaissance is more effective and faster than passive reconnaissance but it also creates more noise and may alert the target or trigger defensive mechanisms.
Google: Google is a powerful search engine that can provide a lot of information about a target, such as its domain name, IP address, subdomains, web pages, files, directories, employees, services, technologies, and more. By using advanced search operators (also known as Google Dorks), hackers can refine their queries and find specific information that may not be easily accessible otherwise
Google Lens: Google Lens is a mobile app that uses your smartphone camera and artificial intelligence to search and understand the world around you. It can scan and translate text, identify plants and animals, explore places and landmarks, find similar products and styles, and more. Google Lens is available in the Google app, Google Photos, and Google Camera
Maltego: Maltego is a graphical data mining tool that can perform link analysis and visualize the relationships between different entities, such as people, organizations, websites, domains, IP addresses, emails, social media accounts, and more. Maltego can use various sources of information, such as online databases, search engines, DNS records, WHOIS records, and APIs to gather data and display it in an interactive graph
Shodan: Shodan is a search engine for internet-connected devices, such as routers, webcams, servers, printers, smart TVs, and more. Shodan can provide information about the device’s location, operating system, services, ports, banners, vulnerabilities, and more. Shodan can also be integrated with other tools like Nmap, Metasploit, Maltego, and FOCA to perform further analysis
FOCA: FOCA is a tool for fingerprinting and metadata analysis. It can extract information from documents, images, and other files that are publicly available on the target website or network. FOCA can also analyze the metadata of these files to reveal information such as authors, dates, locations, software versions, and more
SpiderFoot: SpiderFoot is a tool for OSINT (open-source intelligence) gathering and reconnaissance. It can collect data from various sources, such as DNS records, WHOIS records, social media, web pages, certificates, emails, and more. SpiderFoot can also perform analysis and visualization of the data to identify relationships, patterns, and anomalies
theHarvester: theHarvester is a tool for email harvesting and domain research. It can gather information such as email addresses, subdomains, hosts, employee names, open ports, and banners from different public sources, such as search engines, PGP key servers, and SHODAN computer database
Recon-ng: Recon-ng is a full-featured web reconnaissance framework. It can perform passive and active reconnaissance using various modules that interact with different sources of information, such as online databases, APIs, web pages, and more. Recon-ng can also store the collected data in a local database for further analysis
Nmap: Nmap is a popular network scanning tool that can perform host discovery, port scanning, service enumeration, operating system identification, vulnerability detection, and more. Nmap can send different types of packets to the target and analyze the responses to determine its characteristics and potential weaknesses
Metasploit: Metasploit is a comprehensive framework for penetration testing that can perform reconnaissance, exploitation, post-exploitation, and evasion. Metasploit can use various modules to gather information about the target system or network
BeEF: BeEF is a browser exploitation framework that can perform web-based reconnaissance by hooking browsers of unsuspecting users and executing commands on them. BeEF can collect information such as browser type, version, plugins, cookies, history, geolocation
Amass: mass is a tool for domain enumeration and network mapping. It can discover subdomains, IP addresses, certificates, and other information related to a target domain. It can also perform DNS queries, web scraping, brute forcing, and API integration to gather data from various sources
wpscan: wpscan is a tool for scanning WordPress websites and finding vulnerabilities, plugins, themes, users, and more. It can also perform brute force attacks and password cracking on WordPress accounts
Eyewitness: Eyewitness is a tool for capturing screenshots of web applications and providing some basic information about them. It can also identify default credentials, web server versions, and other potential vulnerabilities
WebInspect: WebInspect is a commercial tool for dynamic application security testing (DAST). It can perform automated scans and manual testing on web applications and web services. It can also detect common web vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and more
ZAP: ZAP is an open-source tool for DAST and penetration testing. It can act as a proxy, spider, scanner, fuzzer, and more. It can also provide alerts, reports, and suggestions for fixing web vulnerabilities