Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the importance of performing reconnaissance and footprinting techniques on a target before exploiting its systems and networks. You learned how to use various strategies to ensure your network traffic is anonymized and how to create a sock puppet to cloak your true identity on the internet. Furthermore, you learned how to use various online tools and Kali Linux to help automate the process of collecting data to profile a target organization, as well as to discover any of their assets, which may be connected to the internet.

I hope this chapter has been informative for you and will prove helpful in your journey as an aspiring penetration tester, where you'll be learning how to simulate real-world cyberattacks to discover security vulnerabilities and perform exploitation using Kali Linux. In the next chapter, Chapter 5, Exploring Active Information Gathering, we will focus more on a direct approach to information gathering and how to...