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CompTIA Security+ 4.4 CompTIA CySA+ 1.1 NIST 800-53 SI-4 NIST CSF DE.CM-09
TechKnowSurge Catalog Interactives Capture, Scan, Poll or Log?
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Capture, Scan, Poll or Log?

Each card is one way of watching the network. Is it capturing, scanning, polling or logging?

⚑ Complete this interactive to capture a CTF flag worth 5 points.

About this interactive

The lesson breaks infrastructure monitoring into four methods. Capturing is passive. Traffic is already flowing across the network; you copy some of it and analyze the packets. Scanning is active. You send out pings or connection attempts across a range of addresses or ports to discover what is there and whether it answers. Polling asks a device you already know about for a value: how busy its CPU is, how much RAM is in use, how hot it is. Logging records an event when it happens, such as a user signing in, so there is a record of it. (The lesson's summary calls the third method probing; the lesson itself and its objectives call it polling, which is the name used here.) Most monitoring systems combine all four, often as a set of sensors per device.

What you'll learn

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+
4.4 Explain security alerting and monitoring concepts and tools.
CompTIA CySA+
1.1 Explain the importance of system and network architecture concepts in security operations.
NIST 800-53
SI-4 System Monitoring
NIST CSF
DE.CM-09 Computing hardware and software, runtime environments, and their data are monitored to find potentially adverse events.

Key terms

Capturing
A passive monitoring method that collects and analyzes packets or data flowing across a network.
Scanning
An active monitoring method used to discover devices, open ports, or services across IP ranges on a network.
Polling
A monitoring method that actively queries devices or systems to retrieve resource metrics such as CPU usage, RAM, or temperature.
Logging
A monitoring method that records system or network events as they occur, creating an auditable history of activity.

Topics

Monitoring Network Monitoring Interactive Categorize

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