Passive Reconnaissance and Tool Usage Notes

Passive Recon

• As we already know, the goal of recon is to find more about information about our target. This can include network info, systems, applications, and other technical and organizational information. This brings us into the methods to obtain this information including passive recon. Passive recon involves not directly interacting with the target but rather making use of existing databases and information on the internet in order to gather info. This usually involves utilizing google search and interacting with publicly known databases in order to complete this passive recon. There are also tools developed to help with passive reconnaissance such as Theharvester and netcraft, and other miscellaneous tools. The main point to understand is that the difference between passive and active recon is directly interacting with the target.

Tool Usage

• A small footnote in this lesson was the trust of tools, understanding where they come from and ensuring that they were developed to help you and not obtain information for a malicious source. By understanding the source of your tools as well as exactly what they do and all of your capabilities, you can avoid issues when blindly running tools.