Understanding active information

Using active reconnaissance techniques enables ethical hackers and penetration testers to use a more direct approach when engaging the target. For instance, many active reconnaissance techniques involve establishing a logical network connection between your attacker machines, such as Kali Linux, and the targeted systems over the network. With active reconnaissance, you can send specially crafted probes to collect specific details, for example, by doing the following:

• Determining how many live hosts are on a network
• Determining whether the targeted system is online
• Identifying open port numbers and running services
• Profiling the operating system on the targeted machine
• Identifying whether the targeted system has any network shares

Therefore, before launching any type of network-based attack, it’s important to determine whether there are live systems on the network and whether the target is online. Imagine...