Book Image

Network Vulnerability Assessment

By : Sagar Rahalkar
Book Image

Network Vulnerability Assessment

By: Sagar Rahalkar

Overview of this book

The tech world has been taken over by digitization to a very large extent, and so it’s become extremely important for an organization to actively design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities can be one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure. Network Vulnerability Assessment starts with network security assessment concepts, workflows, and architectures. Then, you will use open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning. As you make your way through the chapters, you will use these scanning results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. In the concluding chapters, you will dig deeper into concepts such as IP network analysis, Microsoft Services, and mail services. You will also get to grips with various security best practices, which will help you build your network security mechanism. By the end of this book, you will be in a position to build a security framework fit for an organization.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Passive information gathering

Passive information gathering is a technique where no direct contact with the target is made for gathering the information. All the information is obtained through an intermediate source which may be publicly available. The internet has many useful resources that can help us with passive information gathering. Some such techniques are discussed next.

The following diagram describes how passive information gathering works:

Here is how it works:

  1. The client system first sends a request to an intermediate system
  2. The intermediate system probes the target system
  3. The target system sends the result back to the intermediate system
  4. The intermediate system forwards it back to the client

So, there's no direct contact between the client and the target system. Hence, the client is partially anonymous to the target system.

...