Step 3 - Enumeration

The next step in our pentest process is enumeration. During this phase we try to determine the host OS, services running and what version they are.

We already did a little bit of enumeration in my previous post using the Nmap -sV and -O options

Here are those results again

Another great tool we can use is Netcat

Lets use netcat to connect to the apache web server running on port 80

To do this we type nc -vv TARGET PORT

After we have a connection lets pull down the HTTP header to verify the apache server info

Once connected type HEAD / HTTP/1.0 then hit the return key 2x

The results confirm that this server is running Apache version 2.055

Netcat has a ton of other useful features that we will go into later