Footprinting and Reconnaissance

This chapter explains CEH topics on technical assessment methods, port scanning, privacy and confidentiality, data analysis, and vulnerability scanning. The process of getting the size and scope of the target is called footprinting–in other words, the attacker, or hacker, the ethical hacker, is trying to pick up the footprint of the target organization. There are several starting points when it comes to acquiring open source intelligence about hackers target. Public companies are required to provide information about themselves. There are resources hackers can use to look up that information. In the process, hackers may gather information about a company's organizational structure. The Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system can be used to look up public filings such as the annual report in the form 10‐K. To grab information out of the regional Internet registry, hackers would use the who is program. Social networking sites are how people connect.