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)

Understanding Nmap outputs

Nmap displays results based on the responses it receives from the remote hosts. The more hosts that are scanned, the more complex the results are that are printed on the screen. Analyzing these results when printed in terminal or Command Prompt becomes impossible when the number of hosts increases. In order to solve this problem, Nmap supports various reporting formats which can be used as per the user's requirements. One of the simplest ways to store Nmap's output is to use a >> operator followed by a text file name such as output.txt. This will allow Nmap to forward all the contents to that text file. Even the content of a text file becomes a nightmare to analyze for 10+ hosts. Nmap also gives a lot of verbose and debug information, along with a port scan, which can complicate this process even more. The operating system's detection...