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4 Key Knowledge Areas to Knockout First Step of Hacker

Dr. Shekhar Pawar

Founder & CEO @ SecureClaw & GrassDew IT Solutions ??? Doctorate in Cybersecurity from SSBM Switzerland ?? We Offer???Virtual CISO | VAPT | SAST | BDSLCCI | Software Development | Teleservices

发布日期: 2018年9月6日

As a practitioner of ethical hacking domain and leader of IT Security services stream at GrassDew, I am trying my best to spread awareness among my connections to avoid scenarios where their valuable digital assets got hacked.

It is always better to work on prevention than being hacked and face issues followed by cure.

Hackers are also human beings, and they do not really see dreams about their victim and its weaknesses. Most of the times, hacking is a long journey for any hacker where they do invest and study specific group of victims and vulnerabilities in system they reside with.

I am going to throw some light on very first step of any hacker which is known as Foot-printing and Reconnaissance.

What is Foot-printing & Reconnaissance by Hacker?

I was watching some program on TV in National Geographic channel. It was shown how hunters belonging forest tribes were able to search prey using their knowledge of reading foot prints on land.

Same way, reconnaissance refers to collecting information about a target. It has its roots in military operations where it refers to the missions to collect information about an enemy. Information gathering is the first step in any attack on information systems. It helps attackers to narrow down the scope of their efforts and helps them select the weapons of attack. Attackers use information about the target to create a blueprint or footprint of the organization, which helps them in selecting the most effective strategy to compromise system and network security.

Reconnaissance is a process of gathering as much information about the target as possible that can further be used by an attacker in order to determine attack surface of the target. It can be "Active" as well as "Passive".

Active reconnaissance is related to extraction of information by interacting with the target (like port scanning , going inside the target organization and see their security architecture etc).

Passive reconnaissance means gathering publicly available information which someone can get using several other ways.

Reconnaissance can be divided into below main three parts.

Foot-printing : It is all about extracting information about any organization in a less-intrusive way (like passive reconnaissance) .

2. Scanning : It is used for extracting information about network and its implementations using active recon techniques. (techniques here can be intrusive and can be detected by the Intrusion detection system or by firewalls)

3. Enumeration : It is focused on utilizing the information produced by the above two to identify the potential areas from where an attacker can get more information about the organization.

Combining the information of all the three parts an attacker gets an attack surface which he will attack on.

Generally all these has many different stages, which includes -

Determine scope of activity: What does hacker hope to accomplish from target?
Search publicly available information about person or company: such as web pages, locations, subsidiaries, contact names, phone numbers, email, privacy or security policies, links to organization’s other web servers and much more
Perform open-source searches for info on target: news, press releases
Monitor HTML comment tags not publicly shown
Study database lists publicly traded companies: recently-listed or recently-acquired often vulnerable
Network Enumeration means discovering networks attached to the domains
Obtain information from online databases
Identify domain names
Network Reconnaissance means study of network topology via DNS interrogation and network commands

and there are many more...

How Ethical Hacker Can Help You?

An Ethical hackers are hired by organization periodically where they do spend the majority of their time in profiling an organization, gathering information about the host, network and people related to the organization.

Information such as ip address, Whois records, DNS information, an operating system used, employee email id, Phone numbers etc is collected.

In short as outcome of such activities, below four knowledge areas will help organization to avoid open doors for hackers via below areas.

1. Know Security Posture – The data gathered will help management to get an overview of the security posture of the company such as details about the presence of a firewall, security configurations of applications etc.

2. Reduce Attack Area – Such studies can help in identifying a specific range of systems and concentrate on particular targets only. This will greatly reduce the number of systems organizations are focusing on.

3. Identify vulnerabilities – Organization can build an information database containing the vulnerabilities, threats, loopholes available in the system.

4. Draw Network map – It also helps to draw a network map of the networks in the target organization covering topology, trusted routers, presence of server and other information.

We do help our clients to get more security awareness to protect their organisation data and credentials.

We, GrassDew IT Solutions Pvt Ltd, provides consulting services, software solution services, security services, digital marketing and knowledge services.

To know more about our services you can contact me at [email protected]

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