In this chapter, we talked about the importance of information gathering and how it can make or break how successful the penetration test will be. Gathering as much information as possible prior to starting the exploitation phases save you time and effort as you will know what to attack and how to attack it, rather than wasting cycles trying to exploit things that will not work.

We went over a couple of tools in my toolbox for gathering some information. Each tool compliments each other and is powerful in what it can discover. These tools included whois, dnsmap, Nmap, p0f, Firewalk, DotDotPwn and Netdiscover. This is by no means an exhaustive list of tools but some of the more popular and effective ones that I use.

When going through these tools, I showed some examples on how I use them, but I also noted all the command-line arguments that are available. This way you can play around with them and discover which options and tools work best for your environment.

In the next chapter, we...