What is Footprinting

Footprinting is the act of gathering information about a computer system and the companies it belongs to. Footprinting is the first step taken by hackers to hack a computer system/network.

Footprinting is important because to hack any system the hacker must first have all the information about that system. Below I have given an example of the steps and services a hacker would use to get information of any system from websites:-

1) First , a hacker would begin by gathering information on the targets website. Generally the things a hecker looks for are e-mail id’s and names. This information is useful when the hacker is planning to attampt a social engineering attack against the company.

2) Next the Hacker would get the IP address of the websiteby going to

http://www.selfseo.com/find_ip_address_of_a_website.php

Here the Hacker would insert the web URL and the website would return the IP address of the website.

Eg:- The IP address of google.com is 74.125.79.104

The IP address 74.125.79.104 is assigned to  Great Britain (UK)

3) Next the Hacker would ping the server to see if its active , up and running . If the server is offline , there is no point trying to hack it. Here’s how to check if a server is active or not.

goto http://just-ping.com and enter either the domain name or IP adress which ever convenient and you will see a large amount of information . Justping pings a website from 34 different locations in the world. If all the packets went  through properly , the server is up else there is no point trying to hack it

4) Next the hacker would do a WhoIs lookup on the company website. Go to http://whois.domaintools.com and put in the target website.  Here you can see that this gives a huge amount of information about the company . You can find information like campany’s e-mails , address , names when the domain was created , when is it going to expire , The name servers and much more!

5)  A hacker can also take advantage of Search Engines to search sites for data. For example, a Hacker could search a website in google by searching the keyword “site:www.target-site.com” ( without qoutes and your target website after www) . This will display every single Page that google has indexed of that website. You can narrow down the number of results bt adding a specific word after the feyword. For eg : The hacker can enter the keyword “site:www.target-site.com email” , this would list several emails that are published on the website .

Another search that can be done is “inurl:robots.txt” (again without quotes) . This would look for a page called robots.txt . Ihis file (robots.txt) us used to display all the directories and pages that a website wishes to keepanonymous from the search engine spiders. Thus , Luckily you might come across some valuable information that was meant to be kept private in this file.

That’s all regarding the basics of foorprinting.