Information gathering and footprinting
Before we can exploit a target system, we need to accurately enumerate in order to retrieve important information from our targets. This phase of the penetration testing life cycle involves scanning and discovering hosts on a network. We scan these hosts to find the open ports and services that are running along with their versions. Additionally, we identify what operating systems the targets are running.
This is one of the most important phases of a penetration test, as it will determine the overall success of the exploitation phase. If we can gather and enumerate enough information from our targets, we can set up effective attacks and exploits. However, if we don't do this, our exploitation methods will be inefficient and may not yield any results.
We will begin the footprinting process by mapping out our virtual network to discover the target virtual machines and their corresponding IP addresses.
