The Art of Reconnaissance - Simple Techniques

After reading myriad articles on Internet security and hacking, I am convinced that every security conscious computer professional must learn the ways of the hacker. Reading is the only way out. Launching a cyber attack on a target is just like going into war. And like a good Commander who always makes intelligent guess of the enemy's strength and weakness we must first gain knowledge - Reconnaissance is the word for this. Cyber war is like a secret commando attack, wherein after the attack, no traces must be left. The attack and clearing traces is a paper on its own and we shall only give some theory on it in the end. Let me warn you right here, that I have omitted a number of precautions taken by a experienced hacker, for instance they would never use their own phone number to break into any network or even reconnaissance. Reason is simple - Cyber attacks are stealth wars or gorilla wars, the opponent must never know from where you are attacking. For our discussion we will concentrate on basic and simple techniques using real world examples. The paper is divided into 2 parts. Part I is Basic Reconnaissance and part II is about Fingerprinting. The epilogue cites some articles on advanced techniques