Reconnaissance and information gathering
Reconnaissance and information gathering are the acts of learning the network structure and resources in order to prepare to attack them. There are several methods that can be used in order to learn a network structure.
The first and most simple one is to simply listen. Let's explore how we can do it.
Listening to network broadcasts
When you are connected to a port switch, and that could be when you physically connect to a network or you take control of a network device and install a capture tool on it, you will be able to view all of the broadcasts sent and received by this device and others. Let's view some examples of broadcasts that we can learn from.
In Figure 6.1, we can observe some typical Wireshark capture files from which we can learn several things about the network. First, we can see Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) updates, and the interesting thing is that the root bridge has a default priority of 32768.
Important...
