How to perform Foot-Printing in Hacking

Finding IP Address - 

you can use ping command at your prompt. This command is available on Windows as well as on Linux OS. Following is the example to find out the IP address of www.google.com

IP Address ranges  -

Larger websites usually have multiple IP addresses serving different domains and sub-domains. small sites may have a single IP address associated with them, but we can obtain a range of IP addresses assigned to a particular company using American Registry for Internet Numbers 

http://itools.com/tool/arin-whois-domain-search

Email Tracking -

Email messages contain much essential information in their header area which includes the sender, recipients, subject and tracking information.

 • Email header -  The email header is a code snippet in the HTML email document, which contains information about the sender Mail Transfer Agents(MTA) that send and receive the message

 • Mail Transfer Agents(MTA) - It is responsible for transferring and routing an electronic mail message from the sender’s computer to the recipient’s computer, generally sender and receiver are not connected by a direct connection. Hence, we use MTA’s to create a path between the sender’s mail server and the receiver’s mail server. Email headers provide Routing information. 

Port Scanning -

 what are ports? In computer networking ports are defined as a communication endpoint, point through which information flows from a program on your computer or to the computer from the Internet or to another computer in a network, which is used by the Transport Layer protocols of Internet Protocol Suite, such as User diagram Protocol (UdP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

A port number is a 16-bit unsigned integer that ranges from 0 to 65535, but only port numbers 0 to 1023 are reserved for privileged services and designated as well-known ports.

OS Fingerprinting -

 This is a process of figuring out the operating system and version of the victim’s system (windows, Linux, unix, Mac Os). operating system fingerprinting, helps IT administrators to perform vulnerability assessment and internal auditing in securing their networked systems. Meanwhile, it is, oftentimes, the first step to launch security attacks to a targeted system or server.

 Tools -

Nmap, short for network mapper, is an open-source tool for vulnerability scanning and network discovery. Security experts use namp for footprinting and to identify what devices are running on their systems, discovering available hosts and the services they offer, finding open ports, services running on a particular system, finding open and closed ports and detecting security risks. It can be used to monitor single hosts as well as vast networks that encompass hundreds of thousands of devices.