ETHICAL HACKING NET-185-001N Week 2

This week, I learned more about data mining.  I learned about how it is possible to guess people's e-mail addresses, using tools such as http://emailgenerator.io, for any purpose. I also learned about useful website mirroring tools such as http://www.httrack.com, in addition to my pre-existing knowledge of the WayBack Machine of the Internet Archive at http://archive.org. http://DownDetector.com, https://www.isitdownrightnow.com, http://down.com, https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com, and https://status.ws are all free web monitoring services.  Monitority at http://montastic.com is another one, which can e-mail you if a website goes down.  Additionally, I learned about something called FISMA (https://www.dhs.gov/fisma), or the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, which changed the way organizations report on their information handling practices (and data breaches) to the government and public.  While I'd used nslookup to diagnose problems before, I did wonder about it, too.  Unless you decide to live off-grid, it is hard to have pretty much no digital footprint at all.  I learned about how someone can use DNS zone transfers to find out information about potentially private web hosts (such as within a corporate network).  I also learned that there is software for Windows that allows someone to find available domain names with particular characteristics, such as specific words or phrases in them, as well as check across the various top-level domains for different sites (such as http://Google.com versus http://Google.co.uk).   I learned more about how ICMP is used to communicate between devices to handle errors on the internet.  I have used nmap in the past to try to identify the IP addresses of devices on my own LAN at home when I didn't know or had forgotten a particular device's IP address and needed it for management or file transfer purposes.  I hadn't used pathping before, (only having used traceroute and both ipv4 and ipv6 ping) so I will have to check it out more myself, although I'm glad to learn more about it.

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