Summary
This chapter has detailed the first step in an attack process or kill chain: to conduct information harvesting, or passive reconnaissance, to identify the right information on the target with the power of OSINT. Passive reconnaissance provides a real-time view of an attacker’s perspective on a target company. This is a stealthy assessment: the IP address and activities of an attacker are almost indistinguishable from normal business traffic.
The same information is extremely fruitful during social engineering attacks or when facilitating other attacks. We took a deep dive into the use of automated tools to save time and performed passive reconnaissance using both offensive and defensive OSINT.
In the next chapter, we will learn the difference between the types of reconnaissance in an active sense and make use of the data that was harvested using OSINT. Although active reconnaissance techniques will provide more information, there is always an increase in the...
