Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By : Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar
Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By: Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar

Overview of this book

Digitization drives technology today, which is why it’s so important for organizations to design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities is one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure. This Learning Path begins by introducing you to the various concepts of network security assessment, workflows, and architectures. You will learn to employ open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning and use these results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. With a firm understanding of the basics, you will then explore how to use Nessus and Nmap to scan your network for vulnerabilities and open ports and gain back door entry into a network. As you progress through the chapters, you will gain insights into how to carry out various key scanning tasks, including firewall detection, OS detection, and access management to detect vulnerabilities in your network. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be familiar with the tools you need for network scanning and techniques for vulnerability scanning and network protection. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books: •Network Scanning Cookbook by Sairam Jetty •Network Vulnerability Assessment by Sagar Rahalkar
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Active information gathering


Unlike passive information gathering, which involves an intermediate system for gathering information, active information gathering involves a direct connection with the target. The client probes for information directly with the target with no intermediate system in between. While this technique may reveal much more information than passive information gathering, there's always a chance of security alarms going off on the target system. Since there's a direct connection with the target system, all the information requests would be logged and can later be traced back to the source. The following diagram depicts active information gathering where the client is directly probing the target system:

Active information gathering with SPARTA

SPARTA is an excellent active information gathering tool. It is part of the default Kali setup. The following screenshot shows the home screen of SPARTA. In the left pane, you can simply add the IP/host you want to probe:

Upon feeding...