After we have gathered information about our target network from third-party sources, such as search engines, the next step is to discover our target machines. The purpose of this process is as follows:
- To find out which machine in the target network is available. If the target machine is not available, we won't continue the penetration-testing process on that machine and will move to the next machine.
- To find the underlying operating system used by the target machine.
Collecting the previously mentioned information will help us during the vulnerabilities-mapping process.
We can utilize the tools provided in Kali Linux for the target-discovery process. Some of these tools are available in the Information Gathering menu. Others will have to be utilized from the command line. For each of these, the commands are provided.
In this chapter...