What is reconnaissance in cybersecurity?

In ethical hacking, the first, most important step is gathering information regarding your target. Reconnaissance contains the techniques and methodology necessary to gather information about your target system secretly.

Reconnaissance succeeds in two parts: active reconnaissance and passive reconnaissance.

Active Reconnaissance

Active reconnaissance is the process of collecting or retrieving information in a way where target systems can view your actions. It should be done by taking permission. Otherwise, the victim could take severe actions against the hacker. This type of reconnaissance gathers information by interacting directly, so it helps to collect more useful data by notifying the owner about your activities. One example would be researching through the internet.

Passive Reconnaissance

In the passive reconnaissance process, information is gathered without interacting with the victim. It is an indirect approach to connect with your target. Passive reconnaissance is always dependant upon the visibly available data. You can use this technique for gathering information about any company’s technology or employees. Common methods that are included in this technique are as follows:

• Masquerading as a legal net user.
• Wardriving for the detection of susceptible wireless networks.

One example of this would be retrieving information of any target network through port scanning.

7 Steps of Reconnaissance

Some important steps must be followed by ethical hackers during reconnaissance. Let’s discuss these steps:

• Passive Reconnaissance
  • The first step is to collect data about your target.
  • Then hackers must define the range of the network.
• Active Reconnaissance
  • Identification of active systems.
  • Access points and open ports must be revealed.
  • Detect the host operating system.
  • Discover the running services on ports.
  • Network mapping.