Summary

With this, we come to the end of the chapter. We worked through the reconnaissance phase and finished by scanning the web server. In the following diagram, you can view the tasks involved in the reconnaissance phase of a penetration test and some useful tools in Kali Linux that can be used for each task:

Reconnaissance is the first stage of a penetration test. When testing a target that is accessible from the internet, search engines and social networking websites can reveal useful information. Search engines store a wealth of information that is helpful when performing a black box penetration. We used these free resources to identify information that a malicious user might use against the target. Kali Linux has several tools that help you achieve your objectives, and we used a few of them in this chapter.

Finally, we moved on to the scanning phase, which required the hacker to interact actively with the web application in order to identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

In...