Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
It involves network scanning either external or internal without authorization.
DEFINITION OF FOOTPRINTING?
Foot printing is the act of gathering information about a computer system and the compan-
ies it belongs to. Foot printing is the first step taken by hackers to hack a computer system/
network. Foot printing is important because to hack any system the hacker must first have
all the information about that system. Below I have given an example of the steps and ser-
vices a hacker would use to get information of any system from websites:
1) First, a hacker would begin by gathering information on the targets website. Generally
the things a hacker looks for are e-mail id's and names. This information is useful when the
hacker is planning to attempt a social engineering attack against the company.
2)
Next
the
Hacker
would
get
the
IP
address
of
the
website
by
going
to
ht-
tp://www.selfseo.com/find_ip_address_of_a_website.php
Here the Hacker would insert the web URL (website's name like http://www.google.com )
and the website would return the IP address of the website.
Egg: - The IP address of google.com is
74.125.79.104
The IP address 74.125.79.104 is assigned to Great Britain (UK)
3) Next the Hacker would ping the server to see if it's active, up and running. If the server
is offline, there is no point trying to hack it. Here's how to check if a server is active or not.
Got http://just-ping.com and enter either the domain name or IP address which ever con-
venient and you will see a large amount of information. Jostling pings a website from 34
different locations in the world. If all the packets went through properly, the server is up
else there is no point trying to hacking.
4) Next the hacker would do a Who Is lookup on the company website. Go to
ht-
tp://whois.domaintools.com
and put in the target website. Here you can see that this gives a
huge amount of information about the company. You can find information like company's
e-mails, address, names when the domain was created, when it is going to expire, the name
servers and much more!
5) A hacker can also take advantage of Search Engines to search sites for data. For
example, a Hacker could search a website in Google by searching the keyword “
site:
www.target-site.com”
(without quotes and your target website after www). This will dis-
play every single Page that Google has indexed of that website. You can narrow down the
number of results but adding a specific word after the fey word. For egg: The hacker can
enter the keyword “site: www.target-site.com email”, this would list several emails that are
published on the website.
