Network scanning is the procedure for identifying a computer network to gather information regarding computing systems to safeguard your network from unwanted and unusual behavior that can harm your system.
Network Scanning is mainly used for security assessment, system maintenance, and also for performing attacks by hackers.
It can harm even your personal and confidential information, It allows a security analyst or penetration tester to find devices on the network that could be likely opportunities to use to begin a breach into the network.
Network monitoring is a crucial activity to prevent any network from intrusions. Network monitoring tools can make this task a much easier one.
Rapid scanning of network issues makes us aware of the future influence of network attacks and helps us to prepare a prevention plan to avoid them.
The rationale behind IP network scanning is to gain insight into the following elements of a given network:
- ICMP message types that generate responses from target hosts
- Accessible TCP and UDP network services running on the target hosts
- Operating platforms of target hosts and their configurations
- Areas of vulnerability within target host IP stack implementations (including sequence number predictability for TCP spoofing and session hijacking)
- Configuration of filtering and security systems (including firewalls, border routers, switches, and IDS/IPS mechanisms)
Performing both network scanning and reconnaissance tasks paint a clear picture of the network topology and its security features.
Before penetrating the target network, specific network service probing is undertaken to enumerate vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
Objectives Of Network scanning
- To discover live hosts/computers, IP addresses, and open ports of the victim
- To discover services that are running on a host computer
- To discover the Operating System and system architecture of the target
- To discover and deal with vulnerabilities in Live hosts.
