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 vulnerability scan using Nessus

From following the preceding recipes, a user should be able to understand the creation and selection of a policy. Once the policy has been decided upon, all the user needs to do is to identify the host to be scanned, select the policy, and click Scan. The general scan time for Nessus for a noncredential scan of a single host with few ports open will take a couple of minutes. As the number of hosts and ports keeps increasing, the time required for the scan also becomes high.

It is always recommended to inform the stakeholders before performing a Nessus scan, as it would allow an overhead of incident investigation on whether an attack was performed on the host and also inform network admins as to whether network bandwidth utilization may be higher than it is normally.
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