This chapter has given an in-depth view of the reconnaissance phase of cyber attacks. It has discussed external reconnaissance and brought out the ways through which attackers obtain information about an organization's network. It has shown just how easy it is to compromise humans and lead them into divulging sensitive information. It has exhaustively discussed social engineering, one of the most feared types of reconnaissance attacks today. The chapter has also gone through the tools used for internal reconnaissance. It has broadly looked at tools that can scan networks, and those that can be used to break into wireless networks.

In the next chapter, there will be an in-depth discussion of the ways in which hackers compromise systems using information that they obtained from this phase.