Understanding the importance of reconnaissance
Thinking like a hacker helps penetration testers discover and exploit security vulnerabilities within their target organizations. The first stage of the Cyber Kill Chain is reconnaissance as it is the most important part of hacking into a target system or network. Without understanding anything about the target, it will be very challenging or even impossible to compromise the target if the right tools and exploits are not used to take advantage of the security vulnerabilities on the system.
Without performing reconnaissance (information gathering) on the target, both threat actors and penetration testers will have difficulties moving on to the later phases of the Cyber Kill Chain. Hence, ethical hackers and penetration testers must conduct extensive research into gathering as much information as possible to create a profile of their target.
Reconnaissance can be divided into two categories:
