Passive Reconnaissance

As an aspiring ethical hacker and penetration tester, it’s important to develop your skills and gain a solid understanding of how adversaries are able to efficiently discover and collect sensitive information about a targeted organization, and analyze the collected data to create meaningful information that can be leveraged in planning a future cyber-attack on the target. As with many aspiring ethical hackers, we are always excited to get started with hacking into systems and networks as it’s the fun part of learning offensive security tactics and techniques. However, it’s important to develop the mindset of an adversary to better understand why and how a real threat actor will plan their attack on a targeted system, network, or organization.

Adversaries use various reconnaissance techniques and procedures to find and collect data about their targets to better understand whether the targeted systems are online, whether any security vulnerabilities...