Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing(Second Edition)
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Identifying the external network infrastructure

Once the tester's identity is protected, identifying the devices on the internet-accessible portion of the network is the next critical step in scanning a network.

Attackers and penetration testers use this information to do the following:

  • Identify devices that may confuse (load balancers) or eliminate (firewalls and packet inspection devices) test results
  • Identify devices with known vulnerabilities
  • Identify the requirement for continuing to implement stealthy scans
  • Gain an understanding of the target's focus on secure architecture and on security in general

traceroute provides basic information on packet filtering abilities; some other applications on Kali include the following:

The following screenshot shows the results obtained from running the lbd script against Facebook; as you can see, Google uses both DNS-Loadbalancing and HTTP-Loadbalancing on its site. From a penetration tester's perspective, this information could be used to explain why spurious results are obtained, as the load balancer shifts a particular tool's activity from one server to another: