Hacking: The Next Generation

Chapter 1. Intelligence Gathering: Peering Through the Windows to Your Organization

To successfully execute an attack against an organization, the attacker must first perform reconnaissance to gather as much intelligence about the organization as possible. Many traditional methods for gaining intelligence about targets still work today, such as dumpster diving, querying public databases, and querying search engines. However, new methods that rely on gathering information from technologies such as social networking applications are becoming more commonplace. In this chapter, we will discuss the traditional methods as well as how the new generation of attackers is able to abuse new technologies to gather information.

From the attacker’s point of view, it is extremely important to perform reconnaissance as surreptitiously as possible. Since information gathering is one of the first steps the attacker may perform, he must take care not to do anything that may alert the target. The techniques in this chapter will therefore concentrate on methods that allow an attacker to gather information without sending a single network packet toward the target.

Information gathered during reconnaissance always ends up aiding the attacker in some way, even if it isn’t clear early on how the information is useful. Attackers want to obtain as much information about their target as possible, knowing that the data they collect, if not immediately useful, will most likely be useful in later stages of the ...