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Footprinting In Hacking

Footprinting in hacking is the process of studying an organization or system, with the aim of collecting valid or genuine information, which gives the attacker a clue and can help him find the vulnerability in the system.

This is the first step in any systematic hacking approach. Attacker or ethical hacker will spent time in this stage carefully, because slit mistake in footprinting might leads to wastage of time, which can lead to the failure of the attack.

After collecting data, hacker needs to spend time verifying and updating the extracted data. Attacker that doesn't update the data collected, might end-up doing nothing. How? Because the organization or individual can migrate from the known system. Thus leaving him with useless information.

Steps to ensure Proper Information retrieval

Since this stage is all about passive information gathering, below are the best practice that will leads to extracting the most genuine information.

• Carefully collect public available information regarding the target system or organization. Information like host, network information, location of devices, physical security etc.
• Attacker must find out the OS (operating system) used on the host devices and the server respectively. Applications installed on the server are also not left out. Remember servers are as important as the application software installed.
• Attacker have to get an insight regarding the network. Knowing whether the organization permits remote network access, uses WIFI, knows the network topologies in use etc.
• Extracting the IP address and other network information. Networking tools like Traceroute (tracert in windows), Ping, tenet etc. will really give a helping hand here.
• Study the organization set-up. Sometimes the simplest way to hack into any system is to meet non technical staff of an organization.
• In the case of web hacking, online tool like builtwith can surely help in information gathering.
• Issue queries like Whois, DNS, network and organizational queries, will definitely help. especially regarding knowing the networking strength and how to overcome it.
• Certain sites helps in getting information on the target. Site like zabasearch.com (this contains names, addresses, phone numbers, date of birth and other individuals information), anywho.com (this offer phone book forwards and lookup) will really help in getting information on the employees.
• Attacker should locate vulnerability on the existing system which can help in success of the attack.

References: Sybex CEH, Ehacking
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