Defending against a cyber attacker is much like defending against a physical attacker. Like any good military commander, a sophisticated attacker will spend a great deal of effort setting the stage for the attack by learning all about the target’s capabilities. He knows that gaining knowledge of the target’s behavior as well as its defensive and offensive competencies is critical for a successful campaign. Beginning with harvesting public information about the network’s users via public, job site, and social media searches, an attacker can gain a much better sense of the target network via its users.
Once a potential way in is found, the attacker may move on to more active exploration by probing with technical tools to get a sense of the system’s architecture, the network topology, and network policies. Knowing that a target is using a specific version of a firewall, for example, will help the enemy focus his efforts on developing an exploit against that device. Defending against reconnaissance is tricky because the attacker is relying on the same information that legitimate users use to access services or communicate. The question that remains is, how do you best protect your organization by knowing what its footprint is? It’s important to know what your organization looks like from the outside—through the eyes of an attacker.
Pick an organization and execute a bit of passive reconnaissance on the target. Provide as much data on the organization that is possible from publicly available sources. This information may be accessible through social media, the internet, and various other platforms. This section should be about 1 double-spaced page.
Provide an explanation of the reconnaissance techniques that consist of ping sweeping, packet sniffing, port scanning, phishing, social engineering, as well as internet information queries and provide an example for each. Also, provide recommended defense tactics for each scenario. This section should be about 3 double-spaced pages.
