Simple Recon Methodology

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InfoSec Write-ups

6 min readDec 3, 2020

Hey folks, here we back again with the most important topic in penetration testing or Bug Bounty Hunting “Recon” or “Information gathering”.

Content

What’s Recon ?
Recon based scope
simple steps to collect all information in few time
Recommended tools and automation frameworks
Recommended blogs, streams to follow

What’s Recon ?

Before we start our talk, let’s know what’s the recon first?

Recon is the process by which you collect more information about your target, more information like subdomains, links, open ports, hidden directories, service information, etc.

To know more about recon, just see this pic to know where you're before and after recon…

informations Before Recon and After Recon

So the question of which in your mind now is how we will collect all this information, and what’s kind of tools we will use?
Actually, to collect all this information you need to follow methodology, I’ll show you my own methodology and after a few minutes you will know how it works.

My own methodology — 3klcon Automation framework — src: https://github.com/eslam3kl/3klCon/blob/v2.0/3klcon-MEthedology.png

The Recon process should be based on scope, and I mean that you should collect information depending on your scope area (small, medium, or large). The difference will be in the amount and type of data you will collect, so let’s get started.

Recon based scope

We will divide the scopes into 3 types (Small, Medium and large scope)

A. Small Scope

In this type of scopes, you have the only subdomain which you are allowed to test on it like sub.domain.com and you don’t have any permission to test on any other subdomain, the information which you should collect will be like this…

As you can see the information you should collect will be based on the subdomain you have permission to test on it only like directory discovery files, service information, JS files, GitHub dorks, waybackurls, etc

B. Medium scope

Here your testing area will be increased to contain all subdomains related to a specific domain, for example, you have a domain like example.com and on your program page, you’re allowed to test all subdomains like *.domain.com In this step the information which you should collect will be more than the small scope to contain for example all subdomains and treat every subdomain as small scope “we will talk more about this point”, just know the type of the information only.

C. Large scope

In this type of scopes, you have the permission to test all websites which belong to the main company, for example, you started to test on IBM company, so you need to collect all domains, subdomains, acquisitions, and ASN related to this company and treat every domain as medium scope. This type of scopes is the best scopes ever ❤

So here we know all the information which you need to collect for every scope, now let’s talk about how to collect all this info.

Let’s see how to collect this !

Simple steps to collect all information

we will work here as medium scope to be simple to understand

All the tools used here are free as open source on GitHub

collect all subdomains from tools like subfinder, amass, crtfinder, sublist3r (Use more than tool)
Use Google dorks for example site:ibm.com -www
collect all these informations from subdinder + amass + crtfinder + sublist3r + google_dorks and collect all of them into one text file all_subdomains.txt

[*] Now we have 1 text file contains all subdomains all_subdomains.txt, let’s continue…

Pass the text file over httpx or httprobe , these tools will filter all subdomains and return only live subdomains which works on ports 80 and 443
take these live subdomains and collect them into separate file live_subdomains.txt

[*] Now we have 2 text files all_subdomains.txt + live_subdomains.txt

take the live_subdomains.txt file and pass it over waybackurls tool to collect all links which related to all live subdomains
collect all these links into new file waybackurls.txt

[*] Now we have 3 text files all_subdomains.txt + live_subdomains.txt+ waybackurls.txt

take all subdomains text file and pass it over dirsearch or ffuf to discover all hidden directories like https://community.ibm.com/database_conf.txt
collect and filter all the results to show only 2xx, 3xx, 403 response codes from the tool itself (use -h to know how to filter the results)
collect all these informations into text file hidden_directories.txt and try to discover the leakage data or the forbidden pages and try to bypass them

[*] Now we have 4 text files all_subdomains.txt + live_subdomains.txt + waybackurls.txt + hidden_directories.txt

pass all_subdomains.txt to nmap or masscan to scan all ports and discover open ports + try to brute force this open ports if you see that this ports may be brute forced, use brute-sprayto brute force this credentials
collect all the results into text file nmap_results.txt

[*] Now we have 5 text files all_subdomains.txt + live_subdomains.txt + waybackurls.txt + hidden_directories.txt + nmap_results.txt

use live_subdomains.txt and search for credentials in GitHub by using automated tools like GitHound or by manual search (I’ll put pretty reference in the references section)
collect all these information into text file GitHub_search.txt

[*] Now we have 6 text files all_subdomains.txt + live_subdomains.txt + waybackurls.txt + hidden_directories.txt + nmap_results.txt + GitHub_search.txt

use altdns to collect subdomains from subdomains, for example sub.sub.sub.domain.com
As usual :) collect all this info into text file altdns_subdomain.txt

[*] Now we have 7 text files all_subdomains.txt + live_subdomains.txt + waybackurls.txt + hidden_directories.txt + nmap_results.txt + GitHub_search.txt + altdns_subdomain.txt

pass waybackurls.txt file over gf tool and use gf-patterns to filter the links to possible vulnerable links, for example if the link has parameter like ?user_id= so this link may be vulnerable to sqli or idor, if the link has parameter like ?page= so this link may be vulnerable to lfi
collect all this vulnerable links into directory vulnerable_links.txt and into this directory have separated text files for all vulnerable links gf_sqli.txt , gf_idor.txt ,etc

[*] Now we have 7 text files all_subdomains.txt + live_subdomains.txt + waybackurls.txt + hidden_directories.txt + nmap_results.txt + GitHub_search.txt + altdns_subdomain.txt and one directory vulnerable_links.txt

use grep to collect all JS files form waybackurls.txt as cat waybackurls.txt | grep js > js_files.txt
you can analyze these files manually or use automation tools (I recommend manual scan, see references)
save all the results to js_files.txt

[*] Now we have 8 text files all_subdomains.txt + live_subdomains.txt + waybackurls.txt + hidden_directories.txt + nmap_results.txt + GitHub_search.txt + altdns_subdomain.txt + js_files.txt + one directory vulnerable_links.txt