Foot-printing is the technique used for gathering information about computer systems and the person they belong to. To get this information of some system and a person, a hacker use various tools and technologies to get satisfied information to crack his password or system. This information is very useful to a hacker to crack a whole system. information gathering is the first step of followed by hacker to gain related information from target.
in the process of foot-printing there are different technique used to gather information from the target. this information is further used to attack the system. some are as follows :
- Network enumeration
- Network queries
- Operating system identification
- Ping sweeps
- Port Scanning
- WHOIS queries
- DNS queries
Whois
WHOIS is a web application (website) used to get gather information about the target website. suppose if you want to get all information of any website such as: owner of website, contact number, email id, address and so on such kind of information easily can get through https://who.is/ . WHOIS is a very large database and contains information of approximately all the websites. It can be searched by domain name. just type the domain name and search you can get all information related to the target website.
Crawling
Crawling is the process of surfing the internet to get the required information about the target or a system. The sites surfed can include the target’s website, blogs and social networks. The information obtained by this method will be helpful in other methods too.
Search engines
Search engines such as Google can also be used to gather information about the target system. It depends you how well you know to use search engines to collect information. If used properly, the attacker can gather lots of information about a company, its career and its policies etc.
Traceroute
Information can also be gathered using the command Tracert ("traceroute"), it is used to trace a path between a user and the target system on the networks. That way it becomes clear where a request is being forwarded and through which devices. In Linux systems, the tracepath and traceroute commands are also available for doing traceroute operations.
SNS
SNS stands for Social Networking Sites. SNS can be used for footprinting. One method is to compile a list of employees working under the target organization and to look for their details which can again give information about the type and number of staff, systems and security measures which are installed. Websites such as Linkedin, Twitter etc. can be used to gather more information about the target. On the basis of the information gathered social networking can also be performed.
