Information gathering or enumeration or reconnaissance, whichever suits you best, depends upon what
spy movies you've seen.
In any event, they all define the same concept that this phase is the initial stage of penetration
testing lifecycle.
So reconnaissance should be one of the most critical aspects of a successful penetration test for you.
This phase involves identification of various software and services running on the target.
Now.
I'm serious here, the first step for you to take while penetration testing is to figure out which particular
version of the software is running on the target, that you will have a wealth of intelligence about
your target by following comprehensive information gathering and enumeration.
And that's how you decide specifically which attack is good for you to compromise the system.
Now, you may be tempted to immediately launch an automated tool.
However, I really do think that these attempts are less likely to help you to compromise the system.
Failing in this phase might waste your time and also makes you go around attacking machines randomly.
So this isn't something that's good and believe me, you don't want to do it, so the MSF has enumeration
capabilities and it provides you with many auxiliary modules for performing information gathering.
So in order to do that in this upcoming section, I will be exploring a variety of auxiliary modules
within the MSA.
So pay attention.
And what I'm going to do is enumerate the services that use various protocols, such as TCP, UDP,
FTP, SMB, SMTP, HTP, SFH and a bunch of others.