Ethical Hacking: Techniques, Tools, and Countermeasures, 4th Edition

Performing Enumeration Tasks

Enumeration can be thought of as an extension of port scanning. In fact, some of the activities span both steps. The idea is to start with a list of hosts and open (or active) ports. This information is obtained during the port scanning phase. Then, the attacker uses utilities in their hacking toolbox to explore these open ports further by sending packets using different protocols. The most common protocols leveraged in the enumeration phase include NetBIOS, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), and DNS. In addition to just exploring open ports, the attacker can learn a lot more about how a computer (or network or domain) is being used, who is using it, and for what ...