Passive information gathering

• Google
• Email Harvesting
• Netcraft
• Whois
• Recon-ng
• Search for people
• Search Engine Recon Defenses

Google

• use search terms like: insite, intitle, intext, .
• Check Google dorks Google dorks

Email Harvesting

• Use shell command

> theharvester -d target.com -b google >target_google.txt
> theharvester -d target.com -l 10 -b bing >target_bing.txt

Netcraft

• netcraft
• search dns
• Search Engine Features Chart

Whois

• Whois databases contain a treasure trove of information Many can be accessed via the web

  • Alternatively, use the whois command built into many UNIX implementations
  • Used to gather contact names, DNS information, and other data

• First, look up the target at InterNIC to determine the registrar

  • https://www.internic.net/whois.html
  • Operated by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)

• Then, go to registrar’s whois database to get detailed records

  • For example, https://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

• Attackers look for IP address assignments in these geographic whois databases:

  • MUN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) -http://www.arin.net
  • RIPE NCC (Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre) -http://www.ripe.net
  • APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre) -http://www.apnic.net
  • LACNIC (Latin American and Caribbean NIC)
    • http://lacnic.net
  • AFRINIC (Africa’s NIC)
    • http://www.afrinic.net
  • DoDNIC (Department of Defense NIC)
    • http://www.nic.mil (requires account and certificate)

• Another useful site to check out for Whois information

  • http://www.uwhois.com with over 246 countries

> Whois target.com
> whois 10.10.10.10

Recon-ng

Check here for more detat

• We’ll start by using the whois_poc module to come up with employee names and email addresses

> recon-ng
[recon-ng][default] > use recon/contacts/gather/http/api/whois_pocs

• Next, we can use recon-ng to search sources such as xssed for existing XSS vulnerabilities that have been reported, but not yet fixed

recon-ng > use recon/hosts/enum/http/web/xssed

• We can also use the google_site module to search for additional target.com subdomains, via the Google search engine

recon­-ng > use recon/hosts/gather/http/web/google_site

• Another useful example is the ip_neighbour module, which attempts to discover neighbouring IP addresses of the target domain, possibly discovering other domains in the process.

recon-ng > use recon/hosts/gather/http/web/ip_neighbor

Many of the modules in recon-ng require API keys with their respective service providers. Take some time to check out recon-ng and its various modules

Search for people

• You can use http://www.yasni.com/

Search Engine Recon Defenses

• Look for information leakage using Google yourself
• Remove the website (robots.txt file)
  • robots.txt is NOT a security feature; it must be world readable for the search engine crawlers to find it
  • It draws attention to files, and careful attackers are wise to pktnder it for possibly interesting directories and files on a target website
  • Interesting place to refer to a honeypot web page, only referred to in robots.bt
  • Monitor all IP addresses that try to access page
• Remove individual pages ( “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW’ meta tag)
• Remove snippets ( “NOSNIPPET” meta tag)
• Remove cached pages ( “NOARCHIVE” meta tag)
• Remove an image from Google’s Image Search
• Remove unwanted items from Google
  • URL re-crawl request form (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url)
• See http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html for info about non-Google crawlers