WHAT IS FOOTPRINTING?

The systematic and methodical footprinting of an organization enables attackers to create  

a near complete profile of an organization’s security posture. Using a combination of  

tools and techniques coupled with a healthy dose of patience and mind-melding,  

attackers can take an unknown entity and reduce it to a specific range of domain names,  

network blocks, subnets, routers, and individual IP addresses of systems directly  

connected to the Internet, as well as many other details pertaining to its security posture.  

Although there are many types of footprinting techniques, they are primarily aimed at  

discovering information related to the following environments: Internet, intranet, remote  

access, and extranet. Table 1-1 lists these environments and the critical information an  

attacker will try to identify.

👣WHY IS FOOTPRINTING NECESSARY? 

Footprinting is necessary for one basic reason: it gives you a picture of what the hacker  

sees. And if you know what the hacker sees, you know what potential security exposures  

you have in your environment. And when you know what exposures you have, you  

know how to prevent exploitation. 

Hackers are very good at one thing: getting inside your head, and you don’t even know  

it. They are systematic and methodical in gathering all pieces of information related to  

the technologies used in your environment. Without a sound methodology for performing  

this type of reconnaissance yourself, you are likely to miss key pieces of information  

related to a specific technology or organization—but trust me, the hacker won’t. 

Be forewarned, however, footprinting is often the most arduous task of trying to  

determine the security posture of an entity; and it tends to be the most boring for freshly  

minted security professionals eager to cut their teeth on some test hacking. However,  

footprinting is one of the most important steps and it must be performed accurately and  

in a controlled fashion.

I will post on \”how to perform footprinting\” so stay tunned