4

Reconnaissance

Reconnaissance, or recon for short, relates to observing your target to gather strategic information that can be used in your favor. Recon is critical to an ethical hack activity; conversely, it is also used by real-world attackers. In this phase, you focus on information gathering, where this information is used to plan your attack. The more information you gain, the better equipped you are.

As we’ll be focusing on recon, in this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

  • What is reconnaissance?
  • Passive information gathering
  • Active information gathering
  • Wi-Fi recon
  • Performing recon in the cloud
  • Putting what you have learned into practice
  • Best practices

Technical requirements

To follow along with this chapter, ...

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