Know the tools for the first step in Penetration Testing: Information Gathering

Before the exploitation by any malware or by any suspicious activities using any malicious actors, it is a major need to perform penetration testing on your systems. This would be a very bad situation where after getting up from sleep you get the news that your main servers are down and attacked by ransomware.

In the era of cybersecurity and AI where non-tech people are also trying to be hackers just to have fun. Identifying and mitigating the vulnerabilities of the network and servers are major concerns. Information gathering is the first thing you need to do if you start planning penetration testing within your organization’s servers and network. In this blog, we will try to understand the mandatory step of pen testing which is Information gathering.

There are a few techniques and tools, using different operating systems that cybersecurity professionals use to perform pen testing for collecting potentially vulnerable data and identifying the entry points. We shall go through the techniques and the tools that a pentester or ethical hacker must know before starting the pen-testing for any infrastructure.

Pentester’s first move is Information Gathering:

If you want to find the entry points to hack an infrastructure, you need to gather information about the systems or the network. Reconnaissance is another term for Information gathering used by cyber security professionals.

To know more about the target environment and find the potential entry points, ethical hackers or pen-testers use a few techniques that run a few commands from the pen-tester’s device to gather as much information as possible. This information helps the pentester to move forward according to the vulnerabilities that he can find and make the strategy or the plan to attack the entry points by performing any suspicious activities.

Pentesters use the below techniques to gather information:

1. Passive Information Gathering or Reconnaissance: Using different search engines, publicly available information, social media networks, and publicly exposed databases an ethical hacker tries to build a collection of information. This includes the target organization’s employee database, utilized server and network devices, etc.
2. Active Information Gathering or Reconnaissance: In active reconnaissance, the ethical hacker or a pen tester tries to directly interact with the targeted organization’s devices by running the port scanning commands, and identifying the operating systems and the vulnerable services.
3. Information gathering using Social Engineering: In the real world hackers try to manipulate the brain of a human by using different social engineering attacks, maybe by asking different questions in a social media chat, or through a phishing email to ask for an immediate password-changing trap. A pen-tester does the same and tries to gain information using different social engineering techniques.
4. Physical reconnaissance or Dumpster Diving: This involves collecting sensitive information like passwords, network architecture diagrams, hardware configuration information, or a business process workflow by rummaging through the discarded documents or physical devices.

Pentesters favorite tools to gather information:

Nmap: You can not tell yourself a pentester or ethical hacker if you don’t know about the Nmap tool. This is one of the most powerful open-source tools used by pen-testers to gather necessary information like open port details, exposed service enumeration, and fingerprinting operating systems of the targeted organization.

Recon-ng: A framework that pen-testers use for a passive information-gathering process. This has different modules including OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) information gathering and data correlation techniques.

Maltego: To perform data analysis and data mining for the process of reconnaissance, Maltego provides a visual relationship between different entities. This includes IP addresses, domains, etc. This also identifies potential attack vectors and vulnerabilities and provides a visualization of them.

TheHarvester: To collect data from external public sources, an ethical hacker uses this tool to gather email addresses, subdomains, and other DNS-related information. A large amount of data can be collected by this tool which supports different search engines and APIs.

To ensure the proper cyber security practices, penetration testing is a major and critical phase. For successful exploitation and vulnerability assessment, you must have a plan for penetration testing in your existing network and servers. This can be internal or external. With the combination of active and passive reconnaissance techniques, using different tools it is possible to gather hidden vulnerabilities in an organization’s network and server infrastructure.

If you are a system admin or a cybersecurity professional and want to step ahead and ensure the security of your systems and networks and safeguard critical assets then you need to do a regular pen-testing schedule which will ultimately help you to take the necessary initiatives to update your systems and survive from potential threats.