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Reconnaissance Attacks, Tools, Types, and Prevention

A reconnaissance attack is a type of security attack where an attacker gathers information about the target before launching an actual attack. There are three main types of reconnaissance attacks: social, public, and software. Social attacks use social engineering to gather employee information from social media. Public attacks collect target information from public websites and domains. Software attacks use tools like ping, tracert, and port scanners to map the target network and detect running services. Companies can prevent reconnaissance by training employees, limiting public information, disabling unused ports, and using firewalls and network address translation.

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BIBEK CHAUDHARY BSc (Hons) in Networking and IT Security
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174 views

Reconnaissance Attacks, Tools, Types, and Prevention

A reconnaissance attack is a type of security attack where an attacker gathers information about the target before launching an actual attack. There are three main types of reconnaissance attacks: social, public, and software. Social attacks use social engineering to gather employee information from social media. Public attacks collect target information from public websites and domains. Software attacks use tools like ping, tracert, and port scanners to map the target network and detect running services. Companies can prevent reconnaissance by training employees, limiting public information, disabling unused ports, and using firewalls and network address translation.

Uploaded by

BIBEK CHAUDHARY BSc (Hons) in Networking and IT Security
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Reconnaissance attacks, Tools, Types, and

Prevention
This tutorial explains reconnaissance attacks in detail. Learn what reconnaissance attacks
are, types of reconnaissance attacks, how reconnaissance attacks are performed, and
how to prevent a network from reconnaissance attacks.

What is a reconnaissance attack?

A reconnaissance attack is a type of security attack that an attacker uses to gather all
possible information about the target before launching an actual attack. An attacker
uses a reconnaissance attack as a preparation tool for an actual attack.

Types of reconnaissance attacks


There are three types of reconnaissance attacks. These are social, public, and software.
Let's discuss these types in detail.

Social reconnaissance attacks

In this type of attack, a hacker uses social engineering to gather information about the
target. Users share a lot of personal and business information on social networking sites.
A hacker can use social networking sites to gather information about the target. For
example, if the target is a company, the hacker can use social networking sites to reveal
information about the company's employees.

A hacker can use honey trap techniques to lure an employee. Once the employee
accepts the friend request of the hacker, the hacker starts the next step. In the next step,
the hacker convinces the employee to reveal information about his business. For
example, the hacker may provide technical support to the employee on his project. Or
the hacker may offer some monetary reward for disclosing information about the
company.

To reduce social reconnaissance attacks, a company must train its employees about
what information they cannot share with others within and outside the company.
Employees should never share sensitive information on any social platform. If an
employee shares any confidential information with unknown persons or outside users,
the company must take appropriate action against the employee.
Public reconnaissance attacks

In this type of attack, a hacker collects information about the target from public
domains. Companies share location and business model information on their websites.
A hacker can use this information to determine the location of the target. From this
information, a hacker can also determine what kind of infrastructure the target uses. For
example, most web hosting companies share information about their servers and
security equipment. Companies share this information to attract new customers and
gain the trust of existing customers. Hackers can use this information to find
vulnerabilities in the company's network.

To mitigate public reconnaissance attacks, companies should not share confidential


information on public platforms. For business requirements, if a company wants to share
information about its infrastructure, instead of sharing exact hardware information, it
should share generic information. Generic information will fulfill the business
requirement. From generic information, a hacker can't guess the product information.
For example, if a company uses the Cisco Firepower 4100 Firewall, it may publish that we
use the Cisco Firewall.

Software reconnaissance attacks

In this type of attack, a hacker uses software tools to gather information about the
target. Operating systems and software packages include many tools and utilities for
debugging and troubleshooting. A hacker can use them to collect information about the
network and its resources. For example, a hacker can use the nslookup command to
perform a DNS lookup. The nslookup command resolves an IP address from a fully
qualified domain name. Once the hacker knew the domain name of the business, the
hacker can use the whois database to reveal detailed information about domain owners,
mail servers, contact information, authoritative DNS servers, etc.

In the next step, the hacker can use the ping command. The ping command sends
packets to the target host. If the target host is live, the host replies to the packets. Reply
packets verify that the target host is live. The following image shows the sample output
of the ping command.
In addition to the ping command, the hacker can also use the tracert command.
The tracert command prints the path that packets use to reach the destination device.
With the help of the ping command and the tracert command, a hacker can create a
visual map of the target network. The following image shows an example of
the tracert command.
In the next step, the hacker can use port scanners to detect running services on the
target host. To scan services, the hacker can use nmap scanner. The following image
shows a sample output of the nmap port scanner.
To mitigate software reconnaissance attacks, an administrator can use the following
techniques: -

 Can disable all unused ports on servers


 Can use the masking service to hide sensitive information on the whois database
 Can use NAT to hide the internal structure of the network
 Can use software or hardware firewall to filter all specious traffic

That's all for this tutorial. In this tutorial, we discussed what reconnaissance attacks are
and how they work in detail.

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