Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing: A Detailed Examination

This assignment examines the principles of ethical hacking and penetration testing, with a specific focus on the concept of footprinting. It details how footprinting is used to gather information about a target system, including IP addresses, operating systems, and network maps, and discusses the tools and techniques used to perform it. The assignment highlights the importance of footprinting in identifying vulnerabilities and the need for companies to implement security measures like proxy servers and VPNs to protect sensitive information. It also recommends penetration testing to evaluate website security. The assignment concludes by emphasizing the role of ethical hacking in understanding and mitigating cyber threats.

Running head: ETHICAL HACKING AND PENETRATION TESTING
ETHICAL HACKING AND PENETRATION TESTING
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1ETHICAL HACKING AND PENETRATION TESTING
Discussions
Footprinting is the gathering of information about a target system that can be used in
order to execute a successful cyber attack (Bremler-Barr et al.,2016). In order to get this
information, an attacker might utilise different techniques with various tools. This
information is crucial for the hackers in order to break into a system. There are two kinds of
footprinting:
 Active footprinting: it is the way to execute footprinting by getting in tough that is direct
with the machine that is targeted by the hackers
 Passive footprinting: The passive footprinting means the collection of the information of a
system located at a distance that is remote from hacker
Various types of information that can be gathered from the procedure of footprinting. The
information those are gathered include the following:
 Firewalls
 IP address
 Map of network
 Operating system of the machine that is targeted
 VPN
Footprinting employs the first two stages of reconnaissance, gathering the information
about the system that is targeted and then decide range of network of the target. The tool that
is used in footprinting stages is Whois (Berger & Jones, 2016). The systems of the company
are always connected to the internet, so the IP address cannot be hidden by any means and the
hacker can easily get the IP address by the stages of footprinting despite the security
measures of the company. The company cannot detect that the information is being accessed
by the hackers due to the linking of the system with the internet

2ETHICAL HACKING AND PENETRATION TESTING
It is recommended to the company to use a proxy server or a VPN is order to protect the
sensitive information from the hackers. It can be recommended to the company to perform
penetration testing of the website in order to find out the vulnerabilities of the website.

3ETHICAL HACKING AND PENETRATION TESTING
References
Bremler-Barr, A., Hay, D., Krauthgamer, D., & Tzur-David, S. (2016, May). Scalable URL
matching with small memory footprint. In 2016 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP
Networking) and Workshops (pp. 467-475). IEEE.
Berger, H., & Jones, A. (2016, July). Cyber security & ethical hacking for SMEs.
In Proceedings of the The 11th International Knowledge Management in
Organizations Conference on The changing face of Knowledge Management
Impacting Society (pp. 1-6).