Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Practice Question

The activity described is passive reconnaissance, also known as footprinting. In this phase the attacker gathers as much information as possible from publicly accessible sources-search engines, social networks, WHOIS, DNS records-without directly interacting with or sending packets to the target's systems. Because no probes touch the victim's infrastructure, it is considered passive rather than active reconnaissance. Scanning and enumeration involve direct contact with target hosts (for example, port scans), exploitation involves using discovered vulnerabilities to obtain access, and maintaining access occurs only after an initial compromise has succeeded.