Researching a target with passive reconnaissance tools
Hunting and Gathering
© Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash
Cyberattacks often start with preliminary research on network assets and the people who use them. We'll show you some of the tools attackers use to get information.
When sizing up potential targets, attackers try to get as much information as possible without raising any alarms. The ability to passively research the details of online resources and their associated humans has never been easier. If you're wondering what kind of information about you and your network is available online right now, the best way to find out is to look for it yourself.
This article examines some online services that tabulate known information on users and websites. Some of these services use information that is freely available through online sources; others delve into the dark web to find data that has turned up in security breaches. For privacy, and in order to demonstrate richer examples, identifying information in the output of the tools described in this article will be redacted.
Certifiable
A few years ago, the mighty Google announced [1] that it was putting more weight on websites running HTTPS, as opposed to the unencrypted HTTP alternative, for its search engine indexing results.
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