Let's face it.
What made cloud possible?
Well, it was the web, of course, and the Web and websites.
They represent such an important aspect of everything we do in information technology, it seems.
But we have to understand that Web sites represent a very powerful foot printing opportunity for attackers.
Website foot printing means there's this constant monitoring sometimes and analysis of a Web site.
This is another one of those areas where it's painful for me as an instructor or a consultant.
A lot of times because I'm examining an environment and I realize, oh, my goodness, the attackers
have such better documentation and such better knowledge of this network.
They've documented it much better than the organization themselves.
You have to understand that there's a tremendous amount of information that can be gained from the HTTP
headers that are being used in conversations, and these headers can be examined.
Burp Suite Z Proxy Whap a laser web site informer.
These are flashcard fodder.
Remember, we're making flashcards for you when it comes to memorizing tools like this.
For me, burp suite.
I've been using that tool in aware of that tool forever.
Right.
Same with weaponize or so.
A lot of these.
For those of us that have been doing it in cybersecurity for decades, these things are common knowledge
to us.
But I realize it can be stressful for you realizing okay, burp suite, can analyze HTTP headers and
then give powerful information about like the duration of sessions and even identity information that
might be transmitted in the clear.
So lots of information can be gained.
And let's not forget that any common web browser today, Google Edge, anything, right?
Chrome, anything you're using.
I said Google sorry, Chrome, the Chrome browser, they're all going to allow you to examine the underlying
HTML.
Just imagine how much of that might not be sanitized by web teams that aren't following proper protocol.
So there can be a lot of additional extraneous, dangerous information that's revealed in the underlying
HTML.
And that underlying HTML is so easy to take a look at.
What about cookies?
Sure, we know cookies are a security risk, but in this sense, what's happening with this cookie analysis
is, once again, it's giving information about underlying operating systems or things of that nature
that can then be attacked.
As if we didn't have enough to worry about.
We have webbed spiders.
This is like the web data extractor and past hub, and these will go after employee names and email
addresses.
We have discussed tools like this before, reconnaissance with LinkedIn, for instance, but yet another
way to do it is using the web.
There's even user directed spidering products like once again, burp suite in web scarab.
What a great name, web scarab and what does it mean?
User directed spidering will again.
It's going after user information for these systems.
If that wasn't bad enough, remember that website mirroring tools exist.
Wow.
So let's say we have an attacker that's worried about being detected as he's doing a bunch of active
reconnaissance against our website.
He or she just makes a copy of our entire website and then they can study it and break it apart and
really tear at it undetected.
H t track and website copier.
How's that for an obvious name?
Website copier and HD track are tools you can do this with as well as and collector studio.
I remember using HD track decades ago and that was to take the documentation of the vendors website
that was often crashing and highly unavailable at times, and I mirrored it to my own private network.
And then I actually ended up printing it at one point and burning it to CD and having all kinds of fun
with it once I mirrored it.
That was an example of completely authorized copying of public information.
I might point out I have never, nor will I incriminate myself in any of these videos.
Hey, this one's fun.
It's the Wayback Machine.
So this certainly seems like a fun tool to take and look at your crappy website 25 years ago.
And notice this was over 25 years ago, and I had a post about who is hacking who.
So 25 years ago, the the hacking subject was forefront on my mind at my blog.
Something.
Boy, oh, boy.
My blog looks better than this today, I'm happy to say, just to have some fun.
I couldn't resist pulling up Cisco from 1996.
Now I'm so old that I was all over this website at this time, and it really amazes me how long ago
that was, because when I look at this website, it seems like just maybe ten years ago, the Cisco
website looked like this.
I mean, I remember it that vividly.
That sad, I guess.
Real sad.
Anyways, while the Wayback Machine is fun hours and hours of entertainment for you in the family,
the Wayback Machine is also a reconnaissance tool, right?
Maybe you're still using certain tack and your wayback version of your website didn't hide that fact
like you are now.
So they can go back in time and look at what you've done with your site.
That's not good.
That tool suddenly looks a lot less fun.
What about extracting web links?
Sure.
Octopus net peek spider link extractor.
They're all great at indexing and providing a nice cozy list of everything that you link to.
And what about gathering word lists from your Web site?
These word lists can then be fed into dictionaries for password cracking.
There's.
See?
Well, and that product.
Probably not pronounced that way, but I literally do not know how that would commonly be pronounced.
But anyways.
SC Well, sure, it's a word list app that will assist in getting these word lists.
Remember, something else that we are in the business of helping to protect is the metadata.
That's the data about data.
And there's all kinds of tools like Meta Gu fill EXIF tool, web data extractor that go after the metadata
that might leak valuable information we don't want in the hands of the attackers.
Now, I know this is kind of overwhelming and we're just talking about websites, but trust me, we're
going to have a nice, long, long list of countermeasures that you're going to be using to make sure
you don't fall victim here.
By the way, the list goes on of other ways in which websites can be footprint dead.
One of the things attackers will do is they'll monitor your site probably better than you are for changes.
They'll be looking for contact info and cockpit contact info changes.
They'll be looking for your web page posting patterns.
And of course, they'll be analyzing what is getting traffic at your Web site and what isn't.
All of this helps them build a road map for potentially a subsequent attack.
Yikes.
Thanks so much for joining me.
Hope you enjoyed this video as much as I did making it.