Interviews, Questioning, Questionnaires, Observation, Study of existing organizational documents, forms and reports etc.

EC-Council defines seven steps in the pre-attack phase, which include passive information gathering, determining the network range, identifying active machines, finding open ports and access points, OS fingerprinting, fingerprinting services, and mapping the network.

The information gathering techniques are repeated processes that are used to create and organize data across different kinds of sources. There are four types of information gathering techniques as follows: Root cause analysis: One of the information gathering techniques is the root cause analysis.