Intelligence Gathering

General

This section defines the Intelligence Gathering activities of a penetration test. The purpose of this document is to provide a (living?) document designed specifically for the pentester performing reconnaissance against a target (typically corporate, military, or related). The document details the thought process and goals of pentesting reconnaissance, and when used properly, helps the reader to produce a highly strategic plan for attacking a target.

Intelligence Gathering

What is it

• Intelligence Gathering is performing reconnaissance against a target to gather as much information as possible to be utilized when penetrating the target during the vulnerability assessment and exploitation phases. The more information you are able to gather during this phase, the more vectors of attack you may be able to use in the future.
• Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence. [1]

Why do it

• We perform Open Source Intelligence gathering to determine various entry points into an organization. These entry points can be physical, electronic, and/or human. Many companies fail to take into account what information about themselves they place in public and how this information can be used by a determined attacker. On top of that many employees fail to take into account what information they place about themselves in public and how that information can be used to to attack them or their employer.

What is it not

• [Needs Content]

Target Selection

• Identification and Naming of Target
• Consider any Rules of Engagement limitations
  • Rules of Engagement
    • Typical Reconnaissance rules
    • Defining your own rules
• Consider time length for test
• Consider end goal of the test
• Consider what you want to accomplish from the Information Gathering phase
• Make the plan to get it

OSINT

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) takes three forms; Passive, Semi-passive, and Active.

• Passive Information Gathering: Passive Information Gathering is generally only useful if there is a very clear requirement that the information gathering activities never be detected by the target. This type of profiling is technically difficult to perform as we are never sending any traffic to the target organization neither from one of our hosts or “anonymous” hosts or services across the Internet. This means we can only use and gather archived or stored information. As such this information can be out of date or incorrect as we are limited to results gathered from a third party.

• Semi-passive Information Gathering: The goal for semi-passive information gathering is to profile the target with methods that would appear like normal Internet traffic and behavior. We query only the published name servers for information, we aren’t performing in-depth reverse lookups or brute force DNS requests, we aren’t searching for “unpublished” servers or directories. We aren’t running network level portscans or crawlers and we are only looking at metadata in published documents and files; not actively seeking hidden content. The key here is not to draw attention to our activities. Post mortem the target may be able to go back and discover the reconnaissance activities but they shouldn’t be able to attribute the activity back to anyone.

• Active Information Gathering: Active information gathering should be detected by the target and suspicious or malicious behavior. During this stage we are actively mapping network infrastructure (think full port scans nmap –p1-65535), actively enumerating and/or vulnerability scanning the open services, we are actively searching for unpublished directories, files, and servers. Most of this activity falls into your typically “reconnaissance” or “scanning” activities for your standard pentest.