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:
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:
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.
