Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Network Foot-printing (A technique of gathering information
used by Hackers)
Foot printing is the skill of collecting the information about a target. When the thieves want
to steal money from a bank, they don't march in the bank and demand for money. Instead
they plan and gather some important information about the bank like security cameras, se-
curity guards, tellers etc. Similarly the same technique is required for hackers. As it is de-
scribed by (Scam bray et al. 2001) that if the hackers want to attack an organization then
they should gather some basic and important information about the organization's network.
They do so by foot printing. The structured footprinting of a particular organization will
help attackers to gather broad information about security posture of an organization. Then
by an arrangement of tools along with techniques attacker can attack the organization IT
structure.
Network Footprinting
Network footprinting is the gathering of information about a company's network. There are
two types of network footprinting one is known as active and other is known as passive.
Viewing the company's web site comes under passive footprinting. While gathering the
information through social engineering is an active footprinting. In addition to footprint-
ing scanning is quite useful in pinging machines, port scanning and determining network
ranges. There are seven steps:
Gathering the information
The network range determination
Active machine identification
Discovering the access points and open ports Operating System(OS) Fingerprinting
Fingerprinting services
Mapping of the network
We will discuss these seven steps in order to understand the network footprinting.
Gathering the information
The first and important step in the footprinting is the gathering of information. Good in-
formation gathered can prove to be the difference among a successful attack and the one
that has failed to produce maximum benefit out of it. There is a massive amount of in-
formation is available about the organization's these days. This valuable information can
be found over the official web site of the organization, databases, and trade papers or even
