Reconnaissance is an act of information gathering. This involves scouting out a target before carrying out a specific action on it. A White Hat Hacker and a Black Hat Hacker (the two extremities) both need to carry out comprehensive recon activities on their targets for them to achieve a successful hack. A myriad of tools are at the disposal of a good penetration tester or hacker to use in their information gathering process.

One of these tools is Recon-ng, an OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) gathering tool written in Python. For users conversant with Metasploit, using Recon-ng can be a walk in the park because of their striking similarities both in structure and interface appearance. Recon-ng comes readily installed with Kali Linux but has to be manually installed for the other flavors of the Linux operating system. This can be as simple as cloning or downloading it from GitHub. Below is a link to the

https://github.com/methos2016/recon-ng

After installing Recon-ng, the tool can be used by typing recon-ng on the terminal as so: