Summary

Our quest led us to investigate how attackers gather information from their target's website to know the target's exact business functions, important contact information, clients and partners, the management team, and so on. We learned how to use WHOIS, the command-line interface, ping and DNS, and SOA to gather information. We learned about more tools that help with reconnaissance and footprinting, such as Sam Spade, Netcraft, and the Wayback Machine.

We saw how what the information organizations give away for free can reveal a ton of vulnerabilities. So do job sites, marketing materials, customer support, social networking profiles, and financial and competitive analysis data.

We also discussed employees as the weakest link. Their hobbies, the things they share or post online, the places they go to after work, what they buy, and more all give attackers the clues they need. We then discussed how attackers use these clues to join the groups their targets frequent...