Delving into Website Reconnaissance

As the internet continues to grow, there are many websites created almost every day by organizations to help reach new and potential customers beyond traditional borders. Threat actors usually perform a lot of reconnaissance to gather as much information as possible and collect intelligence about their targets’ websites and domains. This information is valuable to threat actors in planning future cyber-attacks on a target. As an ethical hacker, it’s important to identify the attack surface and determine how web reconnaissance can be leveraged by real attackers in planning a cyber-attack.

During this chapter, you will learn how to use common tools and techniques to efficiently collect information about a target, such as its IP addresses and sub-domains, discover hidden directories, and identify the attack surface. Furthermore, you will learn how to use web vulnerability scanners to identify web application weaknesses and work with...