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

DNS reconnaissance

DNS reconnaissance is a common technique used by ethical hackers and threat actors to collect information about a target by gathering publicly available information from DNS servers on the internet. If you recall, DNS is a network protocol that allows a system to resolve a hostname to an IP address, and there are many DNS servers on the internet that contain public DNS records about various registered domain names.

As an ethical hacker, DNS reconnaissance focuses on sending DNS queries to either the target-owned DNS server or a public DNS server to retrieve DNS records about the target’s domain name, IP addresses, and sub-domains. The collected responses are analyzed to identify any valuable information about the target such as their systems and network architecture, potential security vulnerabilities, and application platforms.

In this section, you will learn how to use various tools and techniques to efficiently collect and analyze DNS information...