Footprinting through Professional Sites

By using professinal sites, Attackers can gather valuable information about:

• the Operating System
• software versions
• company’s infrastructure details
• database schema of an organization

Many organizations’ websites provide recruiting information on a job posting page that reveals:

• reveals hardware and software information
• network-related information
• technologies used by the company
  • firewall
  • internal server type
  • OS
  • network appliances
  • hypervisors
  • VMs
• The website may have a key employee list with email addresses. Such information may prove to be beneficial for an attacker. For example
  • if an organization advertises a Network Administrator job
  • it posts the requirements related to that position.
  • attackers can go through employee resumes posted on job sites and extract information such as an individual’s expertise
  • educational qualifications
  • and job history.
    The job history of an employee can reveal technical information about the target organization. Attackers can use the technical information obtained through job sites such as:
• Dice
• LinkedIn
• Glassdoor
• Linkup
  and Simply Hired to detect underlying vulnerabilities in the target IT infrastructure.