Chapter 5: Exploring Active Information Gathering

The more information that's known about a target, the more penetration testers are prepared to simulate real-world cyberattacks with a higher rate of success of compromising the organization's assets. While passive information gathering techniques are very cool and awesome, we need to dig even deeper to gather specific information about the target, though this is not always made publicly available.

Active information gathering can be used to provide very useful results during the reconnaissance phase of a penetration test. With this active approach, the penetration tester makes direct contact with the actual target to gather specific details that Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is unable to provide. Using active information gathering techniques, the penetration tester can create a very detailed profile of the target, gathering information such as the type of operating system, architecture, web applications, and even running...