I’ve been learning a little bit about security and penetration testing in my spare time. I have some friends who are professionals in the industry and I have an interest in it myself so when they mention a tool I like to take a look at what it does and learn a little bit about it.
Fierce is a domain scanning tool, what that means is it scans an organization’s domains for listed hosts. For example, a target company may have several non-contigious IP ranges or have branch sites or locations that aren’t using the same public IP’s as say their website or main office. By scanning their DNS records you might discover some hosts on IP’s that weren’t in the same scope as say their website or primary data center, and thus may be hosts that aren’t as vigilantly maintained. An organization’s IT department might have hosts or backdoors to access a branch location they setup for themselves that they setup a domain name for (ex:branch32-jumphost.company.com) that isn’t apparent by scanning a single IP address range.
[Read More]