Book Image

Network Scanning Cookbook

By : Sairam Jetty
Book Image

Network Scanning Cookbook

By: Sairam Jetty

Overview of this book

Network scanning is a discipline of network security that identifies active hosts on networks and determining whether there are any vulnerabilities that could be exploited. Nessus and Nmap are among the top tools that enable you to scan your network for vulnerabilities and open ports, which can be used as back doors into a network. Network Scanning Cookbook contains recipes for configuring these tools in your infrastructure that get you started with scanning ports, services, and devices in your network. As you progress through the chapters, you will learn how to carry out various key scanning tasks, such as firewall detection, OS detection, and access management, and will look at problems related to vulnerability scanning and exploitation in the network. The book also contains recipes for assessing remote services and the security risks that they bring to a network infrastructure. By the end of the book, you will be familiar with industry-grade tools for network scanning, and techniques for vulnerability scanning and network protection.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

How to perform a script and version scan

While performing penetration tests, reconnaissance is really important for informing the next steps of testing. Even though Nmap provides the open ports and the version of the service running on the port, you will need to know the exact version or the name of the service that is running to prepare further exploits or to gain further knowledge of the system.

The Nmap-service-probes database contains specific packet construction techniques to probe specific services and analyze the responses received from them. Nmap provides information about the service protocol, the application name, the version number, the hostname, the device type, and the OS family. It also sometimes determines whether the service is open to connections or if any default logins are available for the service:

  • -sV (version detection): This flag enables Nmap to perform...