Hey everybody and welcome to the next video.
Now we're not going to be showing anything specific in this video but I just want to have a quick conversation
with you all about automated and manual recon.
Now what I'm gonna say goes same for automated and manual exploitation.
Now what I want everybody to understand is that there are cases where a manual is required and automation
is required in most cases you're going to find a nice blend of both.
Now manual manual recount or manual exploitation will take a little bit more time involved with this.
So when you're manually poking at a port or you're manually doing and map scans or you're doing all
of these type of things manually it takes up a lot of your time because you're half and try to remember
what commands you need to run.
You should be creating like a list of commands that you commonly used just as a backup.
But even if you don't have that right away or even if you do maybe there's commands that you didn't
write down in the past or there's just way too many factors that go involved with manual or you're going
to have to remember relook things back up.
Test a few things out and then be able to continue with what you're doing now automation already has
these kept in mind.
In the end it runs automatically.
Now running things automatically also means you can't tweak anything.
Now if you build your own tools.
That's one thing you can then tweak whatever you want.
However if you are running automated tools that somebody else built unless you plan on either Rican
piling it or changing the source yourself you're going to be stuck with whatever the option is.
Now I do highly recommend as you go through engagements when you find specific vulnerabilities or something
along those lines you start writing scripts to identify this quickly for yourself.
Because especially in enterprise worlds if you find like an authenticated Jenkins servers or web servers
that have admin pages freely available.
There's a lot of times where you're going to want to find this particular stuff quickly when you're
on an engagement so you can do some quick wins.
So if you know you've seen this before in the same environment right you should have a script ready
to go just to check.
You don't want to bother trying to check this manually.
You want to have already have this ready to go and done so you can just run a script in the background
and you'll know every option or every machine in your scope that is vulnerable to the exact same thing
you've already seen.
Now the same thing goes for when you're manually testing things you might see the same things over and
over again when you're manually testing it.
You want to move that to automation.
So you need that quick blend in between both of them to get the best of both worlds because you never
want to rely highly on automation because then then that'll dull your skill set of exactly what's going
on behind the scenes.
You need to always remember that as a red team or you're going to go pretty deep into topics.
Now depending on what team you're on and what your responsibilities are you may be at a higher level
of looking at things from a from a more like a scanner point of view or maybe a reports point of view.
But when you are doing the engagement the last thing you want to do is just run a scan an automated
tool and then walk away and then that's it for your engagement.
You do not want to do that.
You want to have manual intervention and looking at things yourself because there's things a scanner
just cannot give for you are automated tools can not just give for you.
So just keep this in mind.
It's important to keep a quick blend between both of them and make sure you keep your manual skills
sharp as well as being able to use automation so you don't reinvent the wheel over and over and over
and over again.
It's just to even blend in if you if you use one or the other too much you're gonna end up spending
more or more time in general on the engagement than you should have.