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

People and user intelligence

People OSINT focuses on collecting information about a person’s names, address, telephone numbers, usernames, and even their social media accounts. Such information is useful when identifying the employees of a targeted organization and improving social engineering attacks to gain a foothold within the target’s network. People often create social media accounts and add their company, job title, and contact details, which helps threat actors to easily harvest such data when planning their attacks. For instance, employees sometimes include their company’s email address in their contact information on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

Organizations use various formats for their employees’ email addresses, such as the following:

  • firstname @ domain . com
  • firstnameinitial + lastname @ domain . com
  • firstname.lastnameinitial @ domain . com
  • firstname + lastnameinitial @ domain . com
  • fullname...