SMB - Server Message Block Protocol - is a client-server communication protocol used for sharing access to files, printers, serial ports and other resources on a network.
Servers make file systems and other resources (printers, named pipes, APIs) available to clients on the network. Client computers may have their own hard disks, but they also want access to the shared file systems and printers on the servers.The SMB protocol is known as a response-request protocol, meaning that it transmits multiple messages between the client and server to establish a connection. Clients connect to servers using TCP/IP (actually NetBIOS over TCP/IP as specified in RFC1001 and RFC1002), NetBEUI or IPX/SPX.
Once they have established a connection, clients can then send commands (SMBs) to the server that allow them to access shares, open files, read and write files, and generally do all the sort of things that you want to do with a file system
Typically, there are SMB share drives on a server that can be connected to and used to view or transfer files. SMB can often be a great starting point for an attacker looking to discover sensitive information — you'd be surprised what is sometimes included on these shares.
The first step of enumeration is to conduct a port scan, to find out as much information as you can about the services, applications, structure and operating system of the target machine. You can go as in depth as you like on this, however I suggest using nmap with the -A and -p- tags.
-A : Enables OS Detection, Version Detection, Script Scanning and Traceroute all in one
-p- : Enables scanning across all ports, not just the top 1000
Enum4linux is a tool used to enumerate SMB shares on both Windows and Linux systems. It is basically a wrapper around the tools in the Samba package and makes it easy to quickly extract information from the target pertaining to SMB. It's installed by default on Parrot and Kali, however if you need to install it, you can do so from the official github.
The syntax of Enum4Linux is nice and simple: "enum4linux [options] ip"
Functions
-U get userlist
-M get machine list
-N get namelist dump (different from -U and-M)
-S get sharelist
-P get password policy information