Information gathering using tools

Now, as we saw in the previous chapter how gathering information about the client will help us to launch attacks on victims, in this section, we are going to be using commands such as Whois, and tools such as Netcraft and Robtex to gather information from target systems.

The Whois Lookup

The first thing we do before we start trying to exploit or find any vulnerabilities is information gathering. Therefore, we try to gather as much information as possible about the target, and web applications are no different. We're going to start by trying to get as much information as we can about the target IP address, the domain name info, the technology that is used on the website, which programming language is used, what kind of server is installed on it, and what kind of database is being used. We're going to gather information about the company and its DNS records, and we'll also see if we can find any files that are not listed, or any subdomains that are not visible...