HACKING TUTORIAL CLASS 4 ( FOOTPRINTING)

WHAT IS FOOTPRINTING?

Footprinting refers to the process of gathering information about a specific computer

system or a network environment and the company it belongs to. This is the preparatory

phase for the hacker where he gathers as much information as he can so as to find ways to

intrude into the target. Footprinting can reveal the vulnerabilities of the target system and

improve the ways in which they can be exploited.

Footprinting has to be done in a slow and methodological manner where the hacker spends

90% of his time in blueprinting the security profile of the target and only 10% in

launching the attack. Footprinting can actually help hacker decide on the type of attack

that is most suitable for the target.

INFORMATION GATHERING METHODOLOGY

Suppose if a hacker decides to break into a target-company, he can only do so after

blueprinting the target and assessing the possible vulnerabilities. Based on this

information, the hacker can carry out possible attacks such as breaking into the company’s

database, hacking its website or causing denial of service. The following are some of the

different types of information that a hacker could gather before actually carrying out the

attack:

Obtaining the Domain Name Information

Various background information about the target website (domain name) such as the name

of its owner and registrar, date of its registration, expiry date, name servers associated,

contact details associated with it such as email, phone and address can be found out by

performing a Whois lookup. The following are some of the popular websites where you

can perform Whois lookup on any domain to uncover its background information:

http://www.whois.com/whois/

https://who.is/

http://whois.domaintools.com/

Finding IP Address and Hosting Provider

Information such as the IP address of the website and its hosting provider can be very crucial. This can be easily found out using the following website:
WhoIsHostingThis: http://www.whoishostingthis.com/

Finding IP Address Location

Finding out the physical location of the IP address is very simple. Just visit the following
website and enter the target IP address to reveal its physical location:
IP2Location: http://www.ip2location.com/demo
A snapshot of sample query for the IP address 173.252.120.6 on ip2location.com

Finding IP Address Range

While small websites may have a single IP address, big players such as Google, Facebook
and Microsoft have a range of IP addresses allocated to their company for hosting
additional websites and servers. This range of information can be obtained from the
official website of American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The URL for the
ARIN website is listed below:
ARIN Website: https://www.arin.net/
Visit the above URL and insert the IP address of any given website in the “Search
Whois” box found at the top right corner of the web page

Traceroute

Traceroute is a network diagnostic tool to identify the actual path (route) that the
information (packets) takes to travel from source to destination. The source will be your
own computer called localhost. The destination can be any host or server on the local
network or Internet.
The traceroute tool is available on both Windows and Linux. The command syntax for
Windows is as follows:
tracert target-domain-or-IP
The command syntax for Linux is as follows:
traceroute target-domain-or-IP

Usually, the transfer of information from one computer to another will not happen in a
single jump. It involves a chain of several computers and network devices called hops to
transmit information from source to destination. Traceroute identifies each hop on that list
and the amount of time it takes to travel from one hop to another

As shown in the above snapshot, the traceroute tool identifies all the hops present in the
path traversed by packets from source to destination. Here 192.168.0.1 is the private IP
and 117.192.208.1 is the public IP of the source (my computer). 74.125.236.66 is the
destination IP address (Google’s server). All the remaining IP addresses shown in between
the source and the destination belong to computers that assist in carrying the information.

Obtaining Archive of the Target Website

Getting access to the archive of the target website will let you know how the website was
during the time of its launch and how it got advanced and changed over time. You will
also see all the updates made to the website, including the nature of updates and their
dates. You can use the WayBackMachine tool to access the this information.
WayBackMachine: http://archive.org/web/