What is footprinting? What are the techniques used for footprinting?
Foot printing is the reconnaissance stage of hacking where an attacker gathers information about the target organization before launching an attack. Foot printing techniques include:
Web searching – Finding organization info through search engines, job listings etc.
DNS interrogation – Performing DNS lookups to gather hostnames, IPs, MX records etc.
Network scanning – Scanning IP ranges to map out active hosts and open ports.
Email tracking – Tracking email sender IPs and headers to learn about mail servers.
Social engineering – Posing as colleagues to trick employees into revealing sensitive network details.
WHOIS lookups – Harvesting registrant info, IPs, domains etc. from public WHOIS records.
Competitive intelligence – Analyzing what competitors reveal about technologies to build attack plans.