Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Practice Question

Collecting publicly available information about a target before sending any traffic toward its systems belongs to the first phase of the hacking methodology, commonly called Footprinting or Reconnaissance. Because only third-party services are queried and no packets are sent to the organization, the activity is classified as passive reconnaissance. Scanning and enumeration occur later, after the tester has begun actively probing the target, while the gaining-access phase involves exploitation rather than information collection.