A Security Engineer at a medium-sized accounting firm has been tasked with discovering how much information can be obtained from the firm's public facing web servers. The engineer decides to start…

Cross-site scripting involves injecting malicious client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users, which requires sending crafted input, not simply reading response headers.

The engineer used netcat to connect to port 80 and the server responded with HTTP headers revealing 'Microsoft-IIS/6', the server software and version. This is classic banner grabbing - passively collecting service identification information from response headers without any active exploitation. It is commonly used during reconnaissance to identify attack surfaces.

SQL injection involves inserting malicious SQL statements into input fields to manipulate a backend database, which is an active attack not performed by a basic netcat connection.

A Whois query looks up domain registration metadata from a registry database, not HTTP server response headers from a direct port connection.