The Five Stages of Ethical Hacking
Phases of hacking

Phase 1—Reconnaissance
Phase 2—Scanning
Phase 3—Gaining Access
Phase 4—Maintaining Access
Phase 5—Covering Tracks

Phase 1: Passive and Active Reconnaissance
Passive reconnaissance involves gathering information regarding a potential target without the targeted individual’s or company’s knowledge. Passive reconnaissance can be as simple as watching a building to identify what time employees enter the building and when they leave.
However, it’s usually done using Internet searches or by Googling an individual or company to gain information. This process is generally called information gathering.Social engineering and dumpster divingare also considered passive information-gathering methods.
Sniffing the network is another means of passive reconnaissance and can yield useful information such as IP address ranges, naming conventions, hidden servers or networks, and other available services on the system or network. Sniffing network traffic is similar to building monitoring: A hacker watches the flow of data to see what time certain transactions take place and where the traffic is going.

Active reconnaissance involves probing the network to discover individual hosts, IP addresses, and services on the network. This usually involves more risk of detection than passive reconnaissance and is sometimes called rattling the doorknobs. Active reconnaissance can give a hacker an indication of security measures in place (is the front door locked?), but the process also increases the chance of being caught or at least raising suspicion.

Both passive and active reconnaissance can lead to the discovery of useful information to use in an attack. For example, it’s usually easy to find the type of web server and the operating system (OS) version number that a company is using. This information may enable a hacker to find a vulnerability in that OS version and exploit the vulnerability to gain more access.
Phase 2: Scanning
Scanning
involves taking the information discovered during reconnaissance and using it to examine the network. Tools that a hacker may employ during the scanning phase can include dialers, port scanners, network mappers, sweepers, and vulnerability scanners. Hackers are seeking any information that can help them perpetrate attack such as computer names, IP addresses, and user accounts.

Phase 3: Gaining Access
This is the phase where the real hacking takes place. Vulnerabilities discovered during the reconnaissance