Performance evaluation of cyber reconnaissance tools

The stealthy reconnaissance phase is crucial in a cyber-attack. The reconnaissance tools usually limit themselves from balancing between collecting most targets' information possible while hiding itself from being detected by target's defence systems. We assert the role of reconnaissance in web application security attack and evaluate the selected reconnaissance tools in both effectiveness (information gained) and stealth level. We experimentally realised that the reconnaissance tools employing a botnet (or bot, or zombie)-based model has high performance (high level of stealth and little information loss).