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)

Introduction to Network Vulnerability Scanning

In today's times, where hackers are prevalent and there are critical vulnerabilities discovered in various products every day, corporate networks are required to create procedures to identify, analyze, and mitigate vulnerabilities in real time. In this cookbook, we will be looking into various procedures and tools required to perform network security scanning and to understand and act on the results obtained.

This cookbook will equip any reader with a basic knowledge of computer networks with recipes to prepare, plan, and execute a Network Vulnerability Scan and determine the targets for a penetration test, or just to understand the security posture of the network. This will help budding penetration testers to conquer and learn to cook their methods to perform preliminary steps to identify vulnerabilities.

This chapter will introduce you to the basics of computer networks. It also dives into the procedures, uses, and various complexities to consider while performing a Network Vulnerability Scan. This chapter will equip you with basic knowledge of how to plan a Network Vulnerability Scan.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

  • Basic networks and their components
  • Network Vulnerability Scanning
  • Flow of procedures used in Network Vulnerability Scanning
  • Uses of performing a Network Vulnerability Scan
  • Complexity of performing network scans
  • How to devise a mitigation plan and respond