Beginner Guide to Website Footprinting

In our previous article we have discussed a brief introduction of footprinting for gathering information related to the specific person. As we had discussed that there are so many type of footprinting and today we are going to talk about DNS footprinting, website footprinting and whois footprinting.

Browsing the target Website may Providing

Whos is Details

Software used and version

OS Details

Sub Domains

File Name and File Path

Scripting Platform & CMS Details

Contact Details

Let’s start!!

Whois footprinting

WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase who is) is a query and response protocol and whois footprinting is a method for glance information about ownership of a domain name as following:

·         Domain name details

·         Contact details contain phone no. and email address of owner

·         Registration date for domain name

·         Expire date for domain name

·         Domain name servers

From Wikipedia

Whois Lookup:

It is broadly used in support of querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block, or an autonomous system, but is also used for a wider range of other information. The protocol stores and delivers database content in a human-readable format.

Browse given URL http://whois.domaintools.com/in browser and type any domain name.

For example: let’s search pentestlab.in

Now you can see it has created a whois record for pentestlab.in where it contains details like: email address,IP, registrant Org. From given record anyone can guess that this domain have some connection to raj chandel. Then attacker needs to perform footprinting on raj chandel taking help from previous article.

There is so many other tools use for whois footprinting for example:

Ø  Caller IP

Ø  Whois Analyzer pro

Ø  Whois lookup multiple address

DNS Footprinting

Attacker performs DNS footprinting in order to enumerate DNS record details and type of servers. There are 10 type of DNS record which provide important information related to target location.

1.      A/AAAA

2.      SVR

3.      NS

4.      TXT

5.      MX

6.      CNAME

7.      SOA

8.      RP

9.      PTR

10.  HINFO

Domain Dossier: it is an online tool use for complete DNS footprinting as well as whois footprinting.

There are so many online tool use for DNS footprinting , using domain dossier we will check for DNS records of penetstlab.in, select the check box for DNS records and traceroute  and then click on go.

You can observe that, the data which we received from whois lookup and from domain dossier is same in some extent. It has given same email ID as above i.e. rrajchandel@gmail.comand moreover details of DNS records TXT, SOA, NS, MX, A and PTR.

DNS Dumpster: it is also an online use for DNS footprinting.

DNSdumpster.com is a FREE domain research tool that can discover hosts related to a domain. Enumerate a domain and pull back up to 40K subdomains, results are available in a XLS for easy reference.

Repeating same process for pentestlab.in, it will search for its DNS record. From given screenshot you can observe we have received same details as above. More it will create a copy as output file in from XLS. 

You get signal: it is also an online tool use for DNS footprinting as well as for Network footprinting

A reverse IP domain check takes a domain name or IP address pointing to a web server and searches for other sites known to be hosted on that same web server. Data is gathered from search engine results, which are not guaranteed to be complete

Hence we get the IP 72.52.229.111 for pentestlab.inmoreover it dumped the name of 14 other domain which are hosted on same web server.

 Website Footprinting

It is technique use for extracting the details related to website as following

1.      Archived description of website

2.      Content management system and framework

3.      Script and platform of the website and webserver

4.      Web crawling  

5.      Extract meta data and contact details from website

6.      Website and web page monitoring and analyzer

Archive.org: It is an online tool use for visiting archived version of any website.

Archive.org has search option as wayback machine which is like a time machine for any website. It contains entire information from past till present scenario of any website either their layout or content everything related to website is present inside. In simple words it contains history of any website.

For example I had search for hackingarticles.in archived record of 2012.

Built With: It is an online tool use for detecting techniques and framework involved inside running website.

BuiltWith.com technology tracking includes widgets, analytics, frameworks, content management systems, advertisers, content delivery networks, web standards and web servers to name some of the technology categories.

 Taking example of hackingarticles.in again we found following things:

·         Content Management system: wordPress

·         Framework: PHP

Whatweb

Whatweb can identify all sorts of information about a live website, like: Platform, CMS platform, Type of Script, Google Analytics, Webserver Platform, and IP address Country. A pentester can use this tool as both a recon tool & vulnerability scanner.

Open the terminal in kali Linux and type following command

Whatweb www.pentestlab.in

As result we receive same information as above

Web crawling

HTTrack is a free and open source Web crawler and offline browser, developed by Xavier Roche

It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure. 

Give target URL for copy the web site as www.pentestlab.in which starts downloading the website.

http://www.hackingarticles.in/5-ways-crawl-website/

Web Data Extractor

Web Data Extractor Pro is a web scraping tool specifically designed for mass-gathering of various data types. It can harvest URLs, phone and fax numbers, email addresses, as well as meta tag information and body text. Special feature of WDE Pro is custom extraction of structured data.

Start new project Type target URL as ignitetechnologies.in and select folder to save the output and click on ok.

Now this tool will extract meta data, email contact no. and etc from inside the target URL.

From given screenshot you can see it found 40 meta tags1 email 84-phone number from ignitetechnologies.in website.

Similarly there other tool use as web data extractor:

 Web spider

 Competitive Intelligence

Website-Watcher is a powerful yet simple website-monitoring tool, perfectly suited to the beginner and advanced user alike.  You can download it fromhere.

Using new tab and enter target URL which start monitoring the target website.

For example I enter URL hackingarticles.in for monitoring this website.

Similarly there are some other tool uses for monitoring:

On web change

Follow that page

Informinder

Beginner Guide to Footprinting

There are many saying about know your enemy, time and time again these saying have proved to be true. Today we hear all around the work of hackers and many-a-times we fail to protect ourselves. This happens because we are not familiar of their working process. Therefore, in this article we are here to make to accustomed to the first step of the process i.e. Footprinting.

In the world of Cyber Security, Footprinting is the first step which lets penetration testers gather information about hardware or network. It is basically an exploration process which helps us to know our enemy. In order to complete penetration process, one ought to gather as much information as possible.  Footprinting can be done either actively or passively. Assessing a company’s website with their permission is an illustration of passive footprinting and trying to access sensitive information through social engineering is an illustration of active information gathering.

Types of Footprinting:

·         Footprinting through Search Engine

·         Footprinting through social engineering

·         Footprinting through Social Networking sites

·         Website Footprinting

·         Competitive Intelligence

·         WHOIS Footprinting

·         Footprinting using advanced Google hacking techniques

·         Email Footprinting

·         DNS Footprinting

·         Network Footprinting

As this is the first part of our footprinting series, we will discuss first three types of footprinting.

Footprinting through Search Engine

Footprinting through search engine is unambiguous in itself. People often wonder what one can find through search engine as the common concept of search engine is basic exploring. But results given by search engine can be used to hacker’s advantage as they are vast in nature.

Attackers use search to gather information about their target such as technology platforms, employee details, log in pages, intranet portals, etc. which helps in performing social engineering and/or other types of advanced system attacks.

Even search engine cache and internet archives may provide sensitive information that has been removed from World Wide Web (WWW).

There are many search engines where you can find anything that desire from finding a meaning of the word to finding a person. Such search engines are:

www.google.com

www.bing.com

www.shodan.io

www.duckduckgo.com

Now let’s take example of google.com. If I search “Raj Chandel” in Google, then it will give me every possible result associated with the said person.

Same will be the result from other search engines. But different search engines are often used for particular searches. As shown above Google is good for general information. If you want to know that which websites are hosted on a particular server then you can use Bing search engine. To know an IP address of any website just ping the website as shown below

Now, open bing.com and type the IP in the search tab and press enter.

So like this, Bing can give you details about websites which are hosted in same server

Another search engine is shodan.io, it helps to locate various open ports, vulnerable IP’s, and effected digital-ware all over the world.  Open shodan.io in your browser and search for port or IP.

For a detailed tutorial of shodan.io please follow this link:

http://www.hackingarticles.in/shodan-search-engine-hackers-beginner-tutorial/

Footprinting through jobs seeking sites

Similarly, you can collect abundance of information through job sites. You can know about company’s infrastructure details, employee’s profile, hardware information, software information. Some of such sites are:

www.monster.com

http://www.careerbuilder.co.in/

www.dice.com

www.simplyhired.com

www.indeed.com

www.usajobs.gov

www.naukri.com

Footprinting through Alerts

There is also a feature of adding alerts. This feature gives you an alert if anything is changed in particular website; given that you have added an alert to the said website. To do so, open google.com/alerts and type the name of the website that you wanted to alerted about. And then click on create alert.

And this way an alert will be created.

Footprinting through Social Networking sites

Attackers use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest etc. to gain important and sensitive data about their target. They often create fake profiles through these social media to lure their target and extract vulnerable information.

Employees may post personal information such as DOB, educational and employment background, spouse’s names, etc. and information about their company such as potential clients and business partners, trade secrets of business, websites, company’s upcoming news, mergers, acquisitions, etc.

Even the information about the employee’s interest is tracked and then they are trick into revealing more information.

Now if you want to search particular person using just their name or email then there are specialized websites for it like pipl.com and lullar.com

Open pipl.com and type the name of the person you want to search about. For instance I have searched my own name and as you can see in the image below we get positive result.

Now open lullar.com, here you can search for people using their email and much more. Here, I have searched through email (using my own email) and there are positive result in the image below.

Footprinting through social engineering

Social engineering is an art of manipulating human behavior to our own advantage. This proves most helpful when the need of extraction of confidential information. To do so, we have to depend on the fact that people are unaware of their valuable information and have no idea about being exploited. The most common example for this is when people call as fake credit/debit card companies and try to extract information.

Techniques used for social engineering are:

Eavesdropping

Shoulder surfing

Dumpster diving

Impersonation on social networking sites

This is how footprinting is done through search engines, social networking sites and social engineering. As white hat hackers we should know about it but we should also be aware try to protect ourselves from black hat hackers against footprinting.