Development of a platform for measuring the attacking surface of an organization with open source tools

Abstract

Nowadays, organizations implement a great number of diverse web technologies and components in order to serve their needs. This fact broadens their attacking surface which is quite time consuming to be manually tested regularly. Thus, it is useful to have tools that automate these tests. This master’s thesis presents the development of a platform for measuring the attacking surface of an organization with the use of open source tools. A python platform was developed that implements both passive and active information gathering tools and techniques. The aim of this platform is to imitate the reconnaissance and the scanning phase of the attacking procedure that takes place prior to every attack. As a result, the collected information can be used by an organization in order to calculate its exposure and take protection measures. The source code of the present platform is hosted on github “https://github.com/c65pt65in/reconmore.git” and can be downloaded and installed from there.