Whitbread is a British multinational hotel and restaurant company, which is headquartered in Bedfordshire, UK. It originated from brewing being formed in 1742 by Samuel Whitbread. It owns the largest hotel brand in the UK, Premier Inn with over 750 hotels also serving many areas of the world including Dubai, India, Ireland, UK, Russia, EU, China etc. Whitbreads Brands includes Costa, Beefeater, Cookhouse & Pub, Brewers Fayre and Table Table. It had a Net Income of 436 million in 2018 and has over 50000 employees.
Footprinting aka reconnaissance is a method in which information is gathered about computer systems and entities in which they belong to. Hackers may use multiple tools and techniques to acquire this information. One of the uses on footprinting is It allows hackers to acquire much needed information about the target system. This information can then be used to carry out further attacks on the targeted system. This is the reason it may be named a Pre-Attack as acquired information is looked over and reviewed in order to get a successful result from the attack. Information acquired is crucial for a hacker to carry out a successful attack.
Crawling is one of the methods of footprinting, this is the method where a hacker browses the internet to get the necessary information required about their target. Sites which the hacker would be browsing can include the targets Social media, blogs and the targets website. Information attained from this method can be very useful for other footprinting methods.
Whois is a web application which is may be used to get information about the target website, useful information can include the administrator’s mail address and information about the registration. Whois is a massive database which contains a lot of information of basically all the websites. It can be looked up by searching the domain name.
Traceroute: Information may also be attained using a command known as Tracert (“traceroute”). This command is used to track and trace a path which is a user and the target system, meaning that when a requested is forwarded it is possible to see where a request is going and through which device. In Linux Systems, both the traceroute and the tracepath commands are all available for carrying out operations.
Search Engines such as Google/Bing etc can also be used to acquire much needed information about the target system. This is all depending on how well the hacker knows how to use and manipulate search engines to attain information. If used efficiently and properly, the hacker can gather a lot of information about a company and its policies, careers etc. Navigate Web Search can reveal some other websites which can be useful when it’s performed on the target website. Also, negative websites can be used as resources too for insights about problems and flaws of the targeted website.
Firstly, I used Whitbread’s website link to get their IP address which is 104.100.53.103 . By putting the IP address into Shodan I was able to see which ports were open and Expiry dates, Last updates, Host name etc Services which they have acquired. By searching Whitbread careers on Facebook, I browsed through their photos and I found a picture of man receiving an award for Safety and Security. When Whitbread Careers posted it they only used his first name “Trevor” but when scrolling through the comments I found that people most likely work colleagues tagged his Facebook Profile to congratulate him “Trevor Davies”. I found this to be recurring as people tagged the worker if they knew them to congratulate them
