Discovering hosts with broadcast ping scans
Broadcast pings send ICMP echo requests to the local broadcast address, and even if they do not work all the time, they are a nice way of discovering hosts in a network without sending probes to the other hosts.
This recipe describes how to discover new hosts with a broadcast ping using Nmap NSE.
How to do it...
Open your terminal and type the following command:
# nmap --script broadcast-ping
You should see the list of hosts that responded to the broadcast ping:
Pre-scan script results: | broadcast-ping: | IP: 192.168.0.8 MAC: 78:31:c1:c1:9c:0a |_ Use --script-args=newtargets to add the results as targets WARNING: No targets were specified, so 0 hosts scanned. Nmap done: 0 IP addresses (0 hosts up) scanned in 3.37 seconds
How it works...
A broadcast ping works by sending an ICMP echo request to the local broadcast address 255.255.255.255
and then waiting for hosts to reply with an ICMP echo reply. It produces output similar...