Chapter 5: Enumeration

Enumeration is interesting. It does something that we typically don't want to happen. It makes systems behave abnormally or in a way that we wouldn't expect them to. Steve Wozniak, one of Apple's founders, said that a lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things, and that's exactly what enumeration does for us. Enumerating is a core part of evaluating any target. An enumeration can be as simple as running a reverse DNS lookup on an IP address, or as complex as the entire OSINT process being run on a target. Enumerating a target is one of the most important steps in penetration testing. The goal of performing enumeration on a network is to gather as much information about the network as possible. This process typically looks at hosts and the services that they provide. With this information, an ethical hacker can identify and exploit vulnerabilities in the network.

Before enumerating a network...