What Do Others See?

 

What Do Others See? 

You can get a better perspective on the vulnerability of the systems that you need to test by first looking at what potential criminal hackers may be seeing from the outside. To do this, you need to see what kind of trails your system leaves out there whenever someone uses your network.

You can do the following to gather those footprints:

1. Run an online search about the organization that you are working for. If you are performing tests for your personal system,search for items related to you.

2. Do a probe on possible open ports or run a complete network scan to determine specific system reports that outsiders may be seeing about your devices. Since you own the system you are about to test, you can use local port scanners and share-finder tools available on Windows,such as LANguard or GFI.

After that, you can perform more specific searches online. Try to find the following: 

      1. Patents or trademarks

      2. SEC documents

     3. Acquisitions and previous mergers

     4. Press releases about the most vital procurements and changes in your organization

     5. Contact details that point towards members of the organization or employees. You can instantly             do background checks on the following sites: 

                      1. USSeach

                      2. ChoicePoint

                      3. ZabaSearch

 6. Incorporation filings. You can search for these using business sites such as                                              www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml (shows filings of public companies)

Here’s a tip: if you can’t find the information that you are looking for or if you want to dig deeper on a website with a simple keyword search, perform an advanced web search. For example, if you want to find files on a particular website, you can use this strings

     site: www.(domain).com (keyword or file name) – to search for specific files on a particular website

     filetype :swf (company)_(name) – to search for Flash files that can possibly be decompiled to gain         access to encrypted information

Now that you have an idea about what others see about what you are trying to protect online, it’s time for you to start mapping the network and look for your system’s potential vulnerabilities.