The arping application is a simple command that will allow you to ping devices by hostname, IP address, or MAC address. The unfortunate part is that most device will not respond to the arp requests, which are directed broadcast ICMP echo requests, though there are some out there that do. I go into more detail below regarding pinging via MAC address by providing an example of the typical output, example output when a MAC address responds to the ICMP echo requests, and details about how to configure hosts to respond to these ICMP echo requests. I also show a couple of the switches available with arping and provide examples of using arping to ping devices by IP and host.

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The dnsenum.pl Perl script as described in its Perl documentation is a multithreaded script to enumerate information on a domain and to discover non-contiguous IP blocks. So the gist of dnsenum is to gather information about a specific domain using various sources. Information gathered about a domain includes sub domains, associated IP ranges, name servers, mx records, reverse DNS records, hostname IP addresses, and potential vulnerabilities via zone transfers. Below we go into detail regarding the switches available with dnsenum as well as what the command returns by default without and CLI switches.

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The goofile Backtrack menu item ( Backtrack > Information Gathering > Web Application Analysis > Open Source Analysis ) is a great little Python script that provides easy access and results from one of Google’s Advanced Searches. During the information gathering phase of a penetration test it provides a great method to collect data about your target by searching a domain for specific file types. Below we describe goofile in more detail and provide an example of how goofile works.

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SNMP can be a hidden gem that seems to be overlooked sometimes during penetration testing. It is really cool the information you can obtain just using snmpwalk from the command line however the information can be lengthy and unless you are an SNMP OID library or feel like googling a bunch of different stuff it really helps to have tools such as snmpcheck available. Below we describe what snmpcheck, which is written in Perl, will accomplish for you and we also provide a couple of examples against Ubuntu and a Cisco router.

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Need to query Google for vulnerable SQL servers and extract MD5 hashes? The sqlscan.py Python script is your tool then. If you are using Backtrack release 5 you will first need install Python 2.4.4 and then fix sqlscan.py by following the instructions here and here. Once you have sqlscan.py functioning without errors proceed to the example below.

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