Reconnaissance
This is the first step of the kill chain. In cyber attacks, Threat Actors spend some time gathering information that they can use to attack a target. This information includes the hosts connected on a network, and the vulnerabilities in the network or any of the devices connected to it. There are two techniques of conducting reconnaissance; active information gathering and passive information gathering.
In active information gathering, the Threat Actor will interact with a target system to find out its exploitable vulnerabilities. For instance, a Threat Actor could do port scanning on a host connected to a network. The end goal of this exercise will be to find out the open ports that can be exploited.
On the other hand, passive information gathering is whereby a Threat Actor does reconnaissance without interacting with the target system. For instance, Google hacking is a passive information gathering exercise where the Threat Actor uses advanced Google queries...
