As always during reconnaissance, scanning is the initial stage for information gathering.
What is Reconnaissance?
Reconnaissance is to collect as much as information about a target network as possible. From a hacker’s perspective, the information gathered is very helpful to make an attack, so to block that type of malicious attempt, generally a penetration tester tries to find the information and to patch the vulnerabilities, if found. This is also called Footprinting. Usually by information gathering, someone can find the below information:
- E-mail Address
- Port no/Protocols
- OS details
- Services Running
- Traceroute information/DNS information
- Firewall Identification and evasion
- And many more…
So for information gathering, scanning is the first part. For scanning, Nmap is a great tool for discovering Open ports, protocol numbers, OS details, firewall details, etc.
