Book Image

Reconnaissance for Ethical Hackers

By : Glen D. Singh
5 (1)
Book Image

Reconnaissance for Ethical Hackers

5 (1)
By: Glen D. Singh

Overview of this book

This book explores reconnaissance techniques – the first step in discovering security vulnerabilities and exposed network infrastructure. It aids ethical hackers in understanding adversaries’ methods of identifying and mapping attack surfaces, such as network entry points, which enables them to exploit the target and steal confidential information. Reconnaissance for Ethical Hackers helps you get a comprehensive understanding of how threat actors are able to successfully leverage the information collected during the reconnaissance phase to scan and enumerate the network, collect information, and pose various security threats. This book helps you stay one step ahead in knowing how adversaries use tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to successfully gain information about their targets, while you develop a solid foundation on information gathering strategies as a cybersecurity professional. The concluding chapters will assist you in developing the skills and techniques used by real adversaries to identify vulnerable points of entry into an organization and mitigate reconnaissance-based attacks. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a solid understanding of reconnaissance, as well as learned how to secure yourself and your organization without causing significant disruption.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: Reconnaissance and Footprinting
8
Part 2: Scanning and Enumeration

Vulnerability discovery with Nmap

As you learned in the previous chapter, Nmap is one of the most popular network scanners that’s commonly used in the networking and cybersecurity industries to discover host systems, identify open ports, detect service versions, and profile the operating system of a target. Furthermore, there’s the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE), which is integrated within Nmap and provides advanced scanning capabilities using custom Nmap scripts to detect common security vulnerabilities on targeted systems. However, the Nmap scripts that are used by the NSE component can be aggressive and have the potential to crash a system and cause data loss. Therefore, it’s important to consider the potential risk and impact of using NSE during your security assessments as an ethical hacker.

There are a lot of pre-built scripts for NSE that are already pre-installed on Kali Linux. The following are the various categories of NSE scripts:

  • Auth: This...