In the last chapter, we discussed the scoping and planning of a vulnerability management program. This chapter is about learning various tools and techniques for gathering information about the target system. We will learn to apply various techniques and use multiple tools to effectively gather as much information as possible about the targets in scope. The information gathered from this stage would be used as input to the next stage.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Defining information gathering
• Passive information gathering
• Active information gathering