Foot Printing -All you need to know about

Foot Printing is all about collecting the data of the target site, here our intention is to collect the data from multiple possible sources.

Foot Printing is mostly done by Ethical Hackers to identify the data which is available over the internet knowingly or unknowingly, and this data is collectively organized in a structured manner to identify the internal vulnerabilities of the system/software.

Vulnerability : Internal Weakness of the system

During this step, Ethical hackers would like to think from the perspective of a fraudster who is ready to attack the system/software, a strong analysis is made if someone could find a way to identify the vulnerability. If any vulnerability is identified then that would be immediately corrected by the Ethical Hackers team.

Foot Printing is also done by fraudsters to identify the vulnerabilities in the system so that if they could identify the vulnerability, they could easily gain access to the system or break into the software and gain control over it.

Vulnerabilities are more dangerous as they could allow an attacker to

.Install malware

.Perform SQL injection attack

.Perform Buffer Overflows

Active and Passive are the two types of Footprinting

Active Footprinting: Gathering the information about the system by directly communicating with the system

Passive Footprinting: Collecting the information from internet sources like OSINT, whoisdomaintools

Few Possible sources to collect the information:

OSINT Framework: This framework gives a lot of data about the target, we could easily find all the registered emails, contact details, addresses, people under an organization, and many more

Command Prompt: Few Commands helps us to find the IP address of the target

Nmap: It gives details like type of OS, software version, etc...

Zenmap: Similar to Nmap, here GUI is provided over CLI