Are you a cyber security enthusiast? Have you ever wondered how hackers gather information before attacking any target? Well, I’ll take you through four basic websites/tools every cyber security enthusiast should know.
1. Netcraft
Reconnaissance is the first and foremost step performed by any hacker wherein information about the target would be gathered before performing the actual attack. This includes target identification, finding out the target’s IP address range, DNS records, hosting history etc. Let’s assume that an attacker is about to hack a website. Before even attempting to perform the attack, he must collect information about the website. One such tool used to gather information is netcraft. Netcraft is one of the tools used to collect technical information about any website. To hack any target, their IP address, OS and web server has to be known. Netcraft helps in gathering that information.
2. IP2Location
While attempting to steal any sensitive information, it is important for a hacker to know the route through which the packet is travelling. Tracert is the command used to trace the route from source to destination. The command throws the IP locations of the path through which the packet travels. However, the attacker has to deduce the locations from the IP addresses known. One of the websites that can be used is ip2location which identifies the country, region, city, latitude & longitude, ZIP code, time zone etc.
3. ViewDNS
One other website that can be used to gather information when an IP address is known is viewdns.info. Information such as reverse IP lookup, reverse whois lookup, IP history, IP location founder, site down checkability etc can be known here. One such popular use of this tool is reverse IP lookup. This process is used to check whether the website has dedicated hosting or shared hosting. Facebook, Google and other highly secured websites use dedicated hosting on which the attack can be hardly performed. The websites which uses shared hosting will be the hacker’s target since the attack can be easily performed on them.
4. WebArchive
This is an interesting tool. Have you ever wondered how the popular instagram was few years ago? This tool is called Wayback Machine which takes you through the whole view of any website over the years. A hacker can use this tool in order to know the history or any website on which he is going to perform the attack.
So, here we show you some excellent tools that you must know. Well, there are a good number of more tools available in the dark or deep web which normally we don’t have access to. But yeah, we will let you learn about dark web and how to get into it in our new articles until then if you are an aspiring tech enthusiast give these tools a try and make yourself better. Stay tuned and show your love in comment box.
