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Reconnaissance

46 techniques · out of scope

What it is

everything an attacker does to learn about a target before touching it. That includes active scanning of public-facing systems, and passive collection that never touches the target at all: pulling employee names and roles from LinkedIn, reading job postings for a hint at the tech stack, checking DNS and certificate records, searching breach dumps for reused credentials, browsing the company's own public website for org charts and vendor names.

Why it isn't covered here

every range on this platform is built from a network already compromised, captured as the attacker left it. Recon happens before that point, and it happens on infrastructure the attacker controls, not the victim's. There's no telemetry a captured range could ever contain for it, because the activity never touches anything a defender's sensors can see. This isn't a gap in coverage; it's a property of what a network's own logs can and can't record.

Where the visibility actually comes from, in a real SOC

mostly not your own logs. Passive DNS and certificate-transparency logs can show a domain being prepared. Threat intelligence feeds sometimes report scanning activity against your public IP ranges. Web server and perimeter logs catch active scanning if it's aggressive enough to be noisy. But most reconnaissance, especially the passive kind, leaves the victim with nothing to hunt at all. Awareness of the tactic matters more than detection technique here.

The techniques below are indexed for reference so the matrix stays complete. They are not pending write-ups.