Welcome to Section seven and this section, we're going to cover passive and active reconnaissance now,
reconnaissance.
This is a term from the military and the reason why the cybersecurity industry has essentially utilized
this same type of term to essentially gather information is because on the cybersecurity field, in
the cybersecurity fence, you can really think about it as like a military force.
Right, because we are defending essentially different property, different networks.
Right.
And it's all cyber based.
However, we're still that security shield, right.
We are blocking attacks.
We're on the offense.
We're on the defense.
So that's where the term reconnaissance comes from, right.
The military background and where essentially it needs to gather information.
And we're going to talk about the reconnaissance here and a lot more depth.
And let's go ahead and go over the section overviews.
We're going to go over how exactly we're going to use active and passive reconnaissance, what exactly
both of those terms mean.
And then we're going to go over the tools that you can use for passive reconnaissance and the tools
that you can use for active reconnaissance.
And just like I mentioned, reconnaissance is really just a big term for gathering information.
And so we're going to go over several tools, several methods, several different ways that you can
actually gather information by connecting to a network or remotely through, you know, not being connected
to a specific network.
So both of those are actually going to play into what type of strategy that you use, whether you have
access to a network, you can connect to it or you're, you know, on the other side of the world and
you're looking to connect it to a certain network.
Let's look at exactly what reconnaissance is as far as the information gathering.
And really at a very simple level here.
Like I mentioned, information gathering is what really reconnaissance is.
It's a set of processes, techniques, procedures that are used to discover, gather, collect information
about a target system.
Right.
And so during a reconnaissance and ethical hacker attempts to gather as much information as possible
about a target system following these seven steps listed below.
So no one gather initial information data collection by, you know, utilizing several different techniques,
different methods and different tools and then determine the network range and then identify active
machines, which machines are actually connected to the network, how many are in the network, and
then discover open ports and access points.
What areas, what availability is there for the actual hacker right.
Ethical hacker to connect to and access the actual network and then fingerprint and operating system
and then uncovering services on ports and mapping the entire network, looking at how the servers are
connected, how the actual devices are connected, how the networks are set up.
Right.
So let's say, for example, you have like an H.R. department, you have a sales department.
Marketing department.
Right.
They're typically going to have different networks within those departments that all go up and connect
to the main network for the entire company.
And so they're mapping out the entire network that they're looking to target.
And oftentimes they'll target and look at the entire network as a whole and then break off the, let's
say, marketing department and map that out as well as far as a target.
So this is a quick introduction here into the reconnaissance here.
And then he's going to dive a lot more deeper into active versus passive reconnaissance, the tools,
the techniques, the methods, the different things that we're going to be using to gather as much information
about our target prior to going on the attack.
So that's going to be here for this one.
And we'll see you on the next one.