During the pre-engagement phase you are limited to passive reconnaissance only, but management still wants a list of the target company's publicly exposed sub-domains and employee email addresses. Which footprinting tool, included in Kali Linux and written in Python, is purpose-built to harvest this information from search engines, social networks, and PGP key servers without sending direct traffic to the target?
TheHarvester is an open-source reconnaissance utility that comes pre-installed in Kali Linux. It performs purely passive information gathering by querying public sources such as Google, Bing, Baidu, LinkedIn, Shodan, and PGP key servers, then parses the returned data to enumerate email addresses, sub-domains, virtual hosts, open ports, and banners related to a target domain-all without touching the target's infrastructure. Nmap and Nessus require active scanning of the target network, which violates the passive-reconnaissance restriction, and Nikto focuses on active web-server vulnerability scanning rather than OSINT collection. Therefore, theHarvester is the correct choice for the stated requirement.
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What is OSINT in the context of ethical hacking?
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How does theHarvester access publicly available data without touching the target's infrastructure?
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What are the differences between passive reconnaissance and active scanning in ethical hacking?
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What is passive reconnaissance?
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How does TheHarvester collect information?
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Why can't tools like Nmap or Nessus be used for passive reconnaissance?
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Reconnaissance Techniques
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