Theharvester Backtrack 5- Information Gathering Tutorial
Information is a weapon, a successful penetration testing and a hacking process need a lots of relevant information that is why, information gathering so called foot printing is the first step of hacking. An intelligent penetration tester use some intelligent tools and techniques to get the right information on a right time, for social engineering (human hacking) you need relevant information about a person. So the point of this little discussion is to realize the importance of information gathering.
What Is TheHarvester
After getting some knowledge about information gathering you might be interested to know how to perform it. TheHarvester is a tool for gathering e-mail accounts, user names and hostnames/subdomains from different public sources like search engines and PGP key servers. This tools has designed to help the penetration tester on a earlier stage, it is an effective and simple tool that is very easy to use.
Supported Sources for Information Gathering
- Google - emails,subdomains/hostnames
- Google profiles - Employee names
- Bing search - emails, subdomains/hostnames,virtual hosts
- Pgp servers - emails, subdomains/hostnames
- Linkedin - Employee names
- Exalead - emails,subdomain/hostnames
Related Information Gathering Tutorials
Foot-printing or information gathering is not a new term and we have discussed so many articles with different tools and techniques before for both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, Backtrack), here is the comprehensive list of articles.
FootPrinting-First Step Of Ethical Hacking
Maltego- Information Gathering Tool Tutorial
Dnsmap- DNS Network Mapper
Backtrack 5- DNSenum Information Gathering Tool
Download Theharvester
If you are using backtrack 5 and other versions of backtrack than you not need to download and run harvester because it is available on backtrack, while for other Linux distributions like ubuntu download and install it. However you can use Theharvester for other Operating system because it need python to run.If you are using Blackbuntu than theharvester available on it.
TheHarvester Tutorial
Theharvester is a very easy tool to use just follow the tutorial to get the best result. For backtrack open terminal and locate the directory.
root@bt:/pentest/enumeration/theharvester#
For other distributions locate the directory. For best result I use the command
root@bt:/pentest/enumeration/theharvester# ./theHarvester.py -d google.com -l 500 -b googleroot@bt:/pentest/enumeration/theharvester# ./theHarvester.py -d targetsite.com -l 500 -b google
So here is the result with complete details.
I hope you are enjoying the reading, now use the wonderful tool by yourself and if you have any question ask via comment box.
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