The American President Abraham Lincoln, quotable as he may have been, is often (incorrectly) held to have once said,
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
Regardless of where the quote truly came from, we can certainly relate this with hacking. Much success in web penetration testing is determined by what we uncover here, how we sift through the information, and how we couple it with tools covered later in this book. A thorough and methodical approach here will save time, focus efforts, and aid in planning our attacks. The methodologies from the various frameworks and organizations we discussed in Chapter 2, Guidelines for Preparation and Testing, all include some aspects of information gathering, and the tools available in Kali Linux should be familiar to you.
In this book, we&apos...