During a passive reconnaissance exercise, you want to gather historical data about the target's web application that may disclose previous security postures or vulnerable configurations. Which of the following sources would be BEST for obtaining this information?
Inspecting the current robots.txt file to infer past web structure
Performing a DNS lookup to find historical IP addresses associated with the website
Using the Wayback Machine to review snapshots of the website at different points in time
Using social media scraping to gather previous posts about the web application
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web, which captures and stores snapshots of web pages over time. It allows penetration testers to see past versions of a website, which can reveal information that is no longer available on the current version of the site, such as old files, directories, or scripts that might have known vulnerabilities. While other options may also store historical data, the Wayback Machine is specifically designed to capture and archive web pages, making it the best source for the information described in the scenario.
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