IS4560 Unit 3 Assignment 1 Information Gathering Plan The explosive growth and popularity of the world-wide web have resulted in thousands of structured query able information sources on the Internet, and the promise of unprecedented information-gathering capabilities to lay users. Unfortunately, the promise has not yet been transformed into reality. While there are sources relevant to virtually any user-queries, the morass of sources presents a formidable hurdle to effectively accessing the information. One way of alleviating this problem is to develop a information gatherer which take the user’s query, and develop and execute an effective information gathering plan that accesses the relevant sources to answer the user’s query efficiently. Most organizations are familiar with Penetration Testing (often abbreviated to, “pen testing”) and other ethical hacking techniques as a means to understanding the current security status of their information system assets. Consequently, much of the focus of research, discussion, and practice, has traditionally been placed upon active probing and exploitation of security vulnerabilities. Since this type of active probing involves interacting with the target, it is often easily identifiable with the analysis of firewall and intrusion detection/prevention device (IDS or IPS) log files.
However, too many organizations fail to identify the potential threats from information unintentionally leaked, freely available over the Internet, and not normally identifiable from standard log file analysis. Most critically, an attacker can passively gather this information without ever coming into direct contact with the organizations servers – thus being essentially undetectable. Very little information has been publicly discussed about arguably one of the least understood, and most significant stages of penetration testing – the