Footprinting is the technique of gathering information about computer systems and the entities they belong to. This is done by employing various computer security techniques.
Before we learn what is footprinting we have to learn why footprinting is needed ?? As i told you in my last post about Task of hackers. The first step is Reconnaissance
Reconnaissance is gathering as much information as possible about a target before launching an attack. It involves network scanning, either external or internal without authorization.
footprinting
Footprinting as it name suggests , is following someone in which we have to follow its foots prints. So in similar manner its a methodological way to find all information regarding victim.
Footprinting is very important, An attacker spends 90% of the time in profiling an victim and another 10% in launching the attack.
- Footprinting
If the victim is simply a person then method given above is skipped by an attacker , If Victim is an organization then you have to make profile of it with respect to networks.
Any organization setup can be classified under four categories i.e.
Internet , intranet , extranet and Remote access
Internet (Web server , email server etc)
These are the points where you have to work under Internet
- Domain name
- Network blocks
- Specific IP addresses of systems reachable via the Internet
- TCP and UDP services running on each system identified
- System architecture (for example, Sparc vs. x 86)
- Intrusion-detection systems (IDSs)
Intranet (Internal Network)
These are the points where you have to work under Intranet
- Networking protocols in use (for example, IP, IPX, DecNET, and so on)
- Internal domain names
- Network blocks
- Specific IP addresses of systems reachable via the intranet
- TCP and UDP services running on each system identified
- System architecture (for example, SPARC vs. x 86)
- Intrusion-detection systems
Remote access
These are the points where you have to work under Remote Access
- Analog/digital telephone numbers
- Remote system type
- Authentication mechanisms
- VPNs and related protocols (IPSec and PPTP)
Extranet (vendors and Business partners)
These are the points where you have to work under Extranet
- Connection origination and destination
- Type of connection
- Access control mechanism
So now you know what is footprinting , why its needed and what we do in Footpriting. Now the next thing is how it should be done.
So the first step is to determine the scope of your activities , means at what extent you need information.
Second step is to find all Publicly Available Information , so you can collect info which are publicly available like
- Finding a Company URl’s by searching a commpany on search engine like google.
- Check newsgroups , Forums , and Blogs for sensitive Information regarding the Netowrk.
- After knowing the company URL you can guess an Internal Company URL like
“ customer.x.com
products.x.com
clients.x.com
partners.x.com etc “
- Find all the information of company website since the time it was launched. For this you can use
” Archive.org “
- For finding the company Info you can do the Google Hacking
- You can find people information using people search like Intellius.com , people.yahoo.com , best people search.com , Switchboard .com , Anacubius (i2.co.uk/anacubis)
- You can find financial info about company through finance.google.com/finance and finance.yahoo.com
- For finding the entire detail in website you can use Website Copier.
- For finding the company Imp email you can use E-mail Spiders.
Footprinting through Job sites – you can gather company infrastructures details from job posting For example
look’s for company infrastructure posting such as “Looking for System Administrator to manage Solaris network” this means that the company has Solaris network on site.
You can also use Competitive Intelligence Gathering for footprinting. Here is the entire post on Competitive Intelligence Gathering.
Third step is to Discover open ports/access points , Detect Operating Systems ,Uncover services on ports and Map the network all these things come under the third phase of hacking known as Scanning
Now the next thing is to know about Footprinting tools , which i am sharing in my next post which is List of Footprinting tools.
Keep Visiting
Footprinting
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