Hello, aspiring Ethical Hackers. In our previous blogpost Footprinting Guide, you learnt about different types of Footprinting that is performed by hackers and pen testers to gather information about their target. One of the important types of footprinting is Network Footprinting.
What is Network Footprinting?
It is gathering information about the target’s network like ranges of IP addresses used by the target organization, IP address blocks etc. This Footprinting can be considered as a last step before making initial contact with the target using network scanning. This also allows attackers to map the target network.
How to perform Network Footprinting?
Information like range of IP addresses can and their subnet masks can be found out from the Regional Internet Registries (RIR’s) and some other sites given below.
- Whois.arin.net – ARIN whois search
- Apnic.net/about-apnic/whois_search (APNIC)
- AFRINIC whois
- LACNIC whois
- RIPE whois search
- Bgp.he.net.
Apart for these, there is also a tool called Samspade that can be used to perform this footprinting.
traceroute and tracert
Traceroute and tracert are computer network diagnostic commands that display possible route (or path), the packets take to reach their intended target on network. These commands utilize the TTL field in the header of ICMP packets to discover the routes on the path of a target network or system.
That’s all in gathering information about Network.
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