Trilight Zone

[digital8]

If your target is running some services, such as Telnet, FTP, Sendmail, IRC etc' on it's computer, you could simply telnet into them and you will get a daemon banner.
What's a daemon banner, you ask?
Well, companies that produce daemons want to tell the world how great and widespread they are, so they put a little ad about themselves when you connect to them. This is called a daemon banner. Here are some examples for daemon banners:

Welcome to 11.22.33.44, running RedHat 6.0 (Hedwig)
login:
password:


220 alpha.someone.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.9.3/8.8.6; Thu, 8 Jul 1999 21:46:04 +0000 (GMT).


Well, you get the point. Anyway, these daemon banners will tell you what kinds of services your target is running, what OS and a little more... if you havn't noticed, the second daemon banner, which happens to be a Sendmail daemon, tells you what's the time on your target's machine. Why is this so interesting? 'Cause it reveals the target's longitude! This should only be used to verify that the target is really on the country you thought it is on, but don't count on it. The timezone may be set wrong, the time may be set wrong etc'.
Anyway, if you want to find out the time on your target's machine, there's another way to do it. There is a service called daytime that waits for incoming connections on port 13. The problem is that it doesn't exist on every computer in the world, and again, the time may be set wrong, so don't count on it.