I am a newbie so don't give me straight up answers. I want to earn this unlike many people who beg for answers.
Ok the first step is th "banner grab" technique which is basically finding out what operating system they are running on and what version. Then you find out their IP address through a "Whois" search.
Then you find the IP range...confused with that part.
With the IP address you can then go on to search for "active machines" I'm assuming you ping them and see which ones send back packets? If operation time-out occurs, i'm wondering if that means there is no computer to answer back or if it was taking too much time so it canceled its actions.
Now that you have a list of active machines, you can run a portscan. Basically, seeing which ones are willing to "communicate" the port range is from 1 to 65536. The number at which it "communicates" usually determines what type of software is running.
21 FTP server
23 Telnet server
25 Mail server (smtp)
53 Domain name server
80 Web server
443 Secure Web server
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If you want to hack into a website and upload/change files that appear on a a website i'm guessing you'd want to check port 80? Want to look more into that.
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Once you find out the active machine ip address and you find what port it is running on, then you "must" go on to find out what software it is running from its "fingerprints". To do this, you can open up telnet from msdos by typing "telnet (ip address) (portnumber)...now you are connected.
Webservers use the language http to communicate, so to get that information we must use an http request.
HEAD /index.html HTTP/1.0
then press enter twice
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you can also use
www.netcraft.com------
You can fingerprint an ftp server on port 21
That is all I learned so far today. Now I want to look more into a few topics...please - by all means - tell me how I am doing, clues to what i'm doing wrong...a bad direction i'm goin in anything. This will hopefully be an ongoing journal of my education. Hopefully anyone looking for information can look at my post and go through my hard research in a matter of minutes.