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title: Footprinting and Reconnaissance
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## Footprinting and Reconnaissance

Footprinting or Reconnaissance is the process of gathering information about the target before an attack is carried out by a hacker.In a footprinting phase, the hacker will try to collect the maximum amount of information he can about the target which can be useful in an attack such as:

1. Identifying the operating system
2. Scanning ports to detect open ones for exploitation
3. WHOIS queries used to know about registrar information of a particular service.
4. Crawling the web to know more about the target.
5. Collecting phone numbers,email addresses,employee information & other insider information.

In short,footprinting is the first most and an essential phase of penetration testing without which it can be very difficult to perform a hack. 

To gather information a hacker can use various tools and techniques which are listed below.
1. Nslookup
2. Nmap
3. Sam Spade
4. Traceroute 
5. NeoTrace
6. Maltego
7. Recon-ng
8. Dmitry
9. Sparta

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