What is Fingerprinting in Ethical Hacking?

Fingerprinting can be done passively or actively. Active fingerprinting involves directly interacting with the target systems for example sending TCP or ICMP packets then analyzing the response from the target. Whereas, passive fingerprinting are a more stealthy method, for example, obtaining information from the many publicly accessible data sets provided by companies who poll the internet such as Shodan or SecurityTrails. Although a large amount of data can be obtained passively, this technique is often less accurate than active fingerprinting.

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