Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

Active Reconnaissance of External and Internal Networks

The main goal of the active reconnaissance phase is to collect and weaponize information about the target as much as possible in order to facilitate the exploitation phase of the kill chain methodology.

We have seen in the last chapter how to perform passive reconnaissance using OSINT, which is almost undetectable and can yield a significant amount of information about the target organization and its users.

Active reconnaissance builds on the results of OSINT and passive reconnaissance and emphasizes more focused probes to identify the path to the target and the exposed attack surface of the target. In general, complex systems have a greater attack surface, and each surface may be exploited ...