Introduction

Information gathering is the first and one of the most, if not the most, important activities in penetration testing. This step is carried out in order to find out as much information about the target machine as possible. The more information we have, the better our chances will be for exploiting the target. During the information gathering phase, our main focus is to collect facts about the target machine, such as the IP address, available services, and open ports. This information plays a vital role in the process of penetration testing. To achieve this goal, we will be learning certain scanning techniques such as SMB scanning, SSH server scanning, FTP scanning, SNMP enumeration, HTTP scanning, and WinRM scanning and brute forcing by the end of this chapter.

Information gathering, footprinting, and enumeration are terms that are often used interchangeably. But they are still different. According to the SANS standard, footprinting is the ability to obtain essential information...