Understanding active reconnaissance

Active information gathering uses a direct approach to engage the target; it involves making an actual connection between your attacker machine and the target network and systems. By performing active information gathering, you can gather specific and detailed data such as live hosts, running services and application versions, network file shares, and user account information.

Before launching any type of network-based attack, it's important to determine whether there are live systems on the network and that your target is online as well. Imagine launching an attack toward a specific system, only to realize the target is offline. Hence, it doesn't make sense to target an offline device as it would be unresponsive and risk detection.

Tip

Performing active information gathering does pose a risk of being detected.

Systems administrators and even cybersecurity professionals implement various techniques and security controls to...