2. Enumeration/Scanning

This is where a hacker will start interacting with (scanning and enumerating) the target to attempt to find vulnerabilities related to the target.

This is where more specialized tools start to come in to the arsenal. Tools like nmap, dirb, metasploit, exploit-db, Burp Suite and others are very useful to help us try to find vulnerabilities in a target.

In the scanning and enumeration phase, the attacker is interacting with the target to determine its overall attack surface.

The attack surface determines what the target might be vulnerable to in the Exploitation phase. These vulnerabilities might be a range of things: anything from a webpage not being properly locked down, a website leaking information, SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting or any number of other vulnerabilities.

To simplify - the enumeration and scanning phase is where we will try to determine WHAT the target might be vulnerable to.