The first step in the ATT&CK Matrix for Enterprise is the reconnaissance phase.
The Amass tool is a perfect fit for the sub-techniques in the Search Open Technical Databases category which is part of the reconnaissance phase from the matrix above.
Here is a summary of the Amass tool from their GitHub page:
The OWASP Amass Project performs network mapping of attack surfaces and external asset discovery using open source information gathering and active reconnaissance techniques.
Information gathering techniques used by the tool are:
APIs
Certificates
DNS
Routing
Scraping
Web Archives
WHOIS
To install it on an Ubuntu machine you can use this command.
To learn more about each sub-command, (intel|enum|viz|track|db), enter this command in the terminal window:
And replace intel with the sub-command of choice. To get started with the tool you can try out the most basic tool and enumerate subdomains.
This will take a minute or two to run, depending on the domain, replace the example.com domain with the actual domain you want to find subdomains to.
When it has finished you will get a list all the findings, which can be visualized with this command.
This will create a html file in the same directory as the command was executed in. Look for a file called, amass.html. Open it with the command:
There you have a nice presentation of the findings of the domain enumeration.
To learn more about the tool I highly recommend their tutorial.
This is a great and easy tool to use and it’s not only for red teams. It’s always good to know your digital footprints and the potential services that might be exploited. There is almost always something interesting that turns up in the findings.
Happy searching!
