Understanding Footprinting Tools and Countermeasures

Definition

Footprinting is the first step of any attack on information system in which an attacker collects information about a target network for identifying various way to intrude into the system.

Footprinting Tools

There are many footprinting tools that we can use to getting information about our attacker target. Below some of example that we can use to running footprinting process.

1. Maltego, is a program that can be used to determine the relationship and real world links between people, groups of people (social networks), companies, organization, websites, internet infra, phrases, documents, and files.
2. Recon-ng is a web reconnaissance framework with independent modules, database interaction, built in convenience functions, interactive help, and command completion, that provides an environment in which open source web based reconnaissance can be conducted.
3. Fingerprinting Organization with Collected Archives is a tool used mainly to find metadata and hidden information in the documents its scans.
4. Recon Dog is an all-in-one tool for all basic information gathering needs. It use APIs to gather all information so your identity is not exposed.
5. OSRFRmework is a set of libraries developed by i3visio to perform Open Source Intelligence task.

Another tools that we can use to perform footprinting are Prefix Whois, Gmapcatcher, Low Hanging Fruit, DNS-Digger, Sni1per, Reconnoitre, Robtex, Searchbug, Zaba Search, Cloudfaill, Nslookup, DomainHostingView, Aquation, Metasploit, and the Harvester.

Footprinting Countermeasures

Every system surely have an vulnerabilities but we can reduce or prevent it using some tools or policy. Same with that we also can prevent footprinting process with:

1. Restrict the employees to access social networking sites from organization’s network
2. Configure web servers to avoid information leakage
3. Educate employees to use pseudonyms on blogs, groups, and forums.
4. Do not reveal critical information in press releases, annual reports, and product catalogs.
5. Limit amount of information that you are publishing on the website/internet.
6. Use footprinting techniques to discover and remove any sensitive information publicly available.
7. Prevent search engine from caching a web page and use anonymous registration services.
8. Develop security policies to regulate the information that employees can reveal to third parties.
9. Set apart internal and external DNS or use split DNS, and restrict zone transfer to authorized servers.
10. Disable directory listings in the web servers
11. Conduct periodically security awareness training to educate employees about various social engineering tricks and risks.
12. Optimaliation for privacy services on Whois Lookup Database.
13. Avoid domain-level cross-linking for the critical assets.
14. Encrypt and password protect sensitive information.

Conclusion

In the above we know that some of tools that we can use for doing Footprinting to our target attack. For choosing which one tools that we use it depends on need and function.

As users or companies we can reduce vulnerabilities and prevent footprinting process to our data using some tips that was described above.

Footprinting is the first step of attacking (knowing information about target attack) if we can prevent this step it will better for reduce attackers opportunity to getting our public information.