Footprinting is the technique of Gathering Information about the target. This is the very first stage of hacking. There are two stages of footprinting :
1. Active Stage
2. Passive Stage
Active Stage
In active stage of footprinting or Information Gathering, attacker or hacker used to collect information about target or victim actively means target or victim knows the attacker but he don't know his intention. Let me clear with an example:
Let us assume that Mx. Target is a very rich person and Mr. Hacker want to steal some files from his computer. In order to do that Mr. Hacker meets the Mr. Target in some business meetings and offer a friendship which is accepted by Mr. Target. So from now Mr. Target know Mr. Hacker but don't know his intention. As time passes, both will become a good friend and started sharing their personals like images, business tips, computer. So from now Mr. Hacker has access to Mr. Target's computer access and he can do whatever he wants. Now you can understand what is Active Stage of Footprinting or Information Gathering. And from here we can also assume that is not the safe way to collect information because Target already knows Hacker or Attacker so he can directly point to Attacker.
Passive Stage
This stage is the safest way to collect information about the target. Lets come and see how to perform this by an example :
We will go by same example as above. So here is our target Mr. Target who is a very rich person. First of all Mr. Hacker use google to find information about the target, because google is always a great tool for hackers to find useful resources. Remember Google is not a search engine for Hacker's its a tool for hacker's to perform safest way of Information Gathering or Footprinting. So now Mr. Hacker has some information about Mr. Target and he can also assume his business and his knowledge about computers and suppose his knowledge is zero about computers then Mr. Hacker can easily perform network scan and create a backdoor to Mr. Target Computer's and can find any information he wants. Friends we will see how to perform network scan and create a backdoor as this is not a part of this section we are not covering here.
Benefits of Footprinting
1. Since the process is passive and no direct contact is made with Target, footprinting provides higher degree of Stealth and Anonymity.
2. Passive Way of footprinting can help us collecting data which might prove to be useful in locating and exploring vulnerabilities in Technical Infrastructure of the target.
Footprinting Techniques
1. By crawling target's company website
2. Whois Database search
3. Google Search
4. Similar Domain Names
5. MX Entry
6. Traceroute
7. Archive Pages
8. Negative Websites
9. Social and Business Networking Sites
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