Passive reconnaissance involves collecting information through which of the following?

Social engineering requires direct human-to-human interaction with target personnel to manipulate them into revealing information, making it an active technique.

Network traffic sniffing requires physical or logical access to the target network and involves capturing live traffic, which constitutes direct interaction with the target environment.

Man-in-the-middle attacks require actively intercepting and relaying communications between two parties, which is an offensive active technique rather than passive information gathering.

Passive reconnaissance uses publicly available sources such as WHOIS records, DNS lookups, search engines, social media, and job postings to gather target intelligence without ever directly contacting or sending packets to the target system. This approach avoids detection because no traffic is generated against the target.