How to Footprint a Corporate Network for Security and Pen Testing
This article is part # 4 in this series of penetration and security testing of a corporate network. Previously I talked about some dirty tactics which penetration testers might have to use. I also started this series by talking in general about Penetration and security testing and also some important computer security keywords and terminologies.
In this article, I will introduce you to some well known tools which security analysts use, to know more about the layout of the network they are trying to test and also gather intelligence about that company, Â which we will use later on to conduct further tests and poke it for its weak points. The more information we can obtain, the more we can advice our client company of any potential problem areas. This whole process is called footprinting.
Footprinting
Definition from Wikipedia)
Footprinting is the technique of gathering information about computer systems and the entities they belong to. This is done by employing various computer security techniques, as Ping Sweeps, TCP Scans, UDP Scans, OS Identification, Network Enumeration, Registrar Queries, Organizational Queries, Domain Queries, Network Queries, POC Queries and DNS Interrogation
When used in the computer security lexicon, “footprinting” generally refers to one of the pre-attack phases; tasks performed prior to doing the actual attack. Some of the tools used for footprinting are samspade, nslookup, traceroute and neotrace.
I will not be revealing what kind of Business my client does, but a lot of corporations out there perform most of their business online, through the web. Each of these companies would have a web site which should be the first place we use to gather intelligence about the company.
==================TOOL # 1: PAROS (http://www.parosproxy.org)
Paros is a Java based HTTP/HTTPS proxy for assessing web application vulnerability. It supports editing/viewing HTTP messages on-the-fly. Other featuers include spiders, client certificate, proxy-chaining, intelligent scanning for XSS and SQL injections etc.
Paros requires that you have Java J2SE installed which you can download from Sun here. Paros is also available in both Unix and Windows platforms. You can download Parox Proxy here.
1. After you download Paros, you need to configure your browser’s Internet options. Set your HTTP proxy and Secure proxy addresses to “localhost” with port “8080″ as shown below

2. Launch Paros. In this example, we will use mit.edu as our target Internet location. Type in http://www.mit.edu. If you go back to Paros, you will see a screen that looks something like this







All of us have experienced the tremendous pains of spam. Who can remember the glory days of Hotmail 2MB storage where 85% of the inbox was filled with spam. While this plague is going to exist for some more time, here are a few tips we can take to overcome this issue and prevent spam from hitting your inbox.