Ping Sweep, Port Scan or Outside Probe?

About this interactive

The lesson's scan usually starts with a ping sweep: ping every address in a range and see which answer. That tells you which addresses have a live device on them. Then a port scan goes deeper on each host: which ports are open shows which services it offers, which may be services that should be closed, and often what kind of device it is (a Windows server, a printer). Tools such as Nmap do both, and PRTG can run them on a schedule to find new equipment. A hosted probing service such as Pingdom works from the outside. It keeps testing whether your public site answers, from many countries, and warns you when it does not. The lesson calls that probing rather than scanning, and it is the only one of the three that can tell you what the internet sees, even when your own network is down.

What you'll learn

Choose a ping sweep to find which addresses have a live device, a port scan to find which services a host offers and what kind of device it is, or an outside probing service to test from many regions whether a public site answers
Recognize the reasons the lesson gives for scanning: recording uptime and availability, discovering assets, finding open services that should be closed, and building a network map

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

4.4 Explain security alerting and monitoring concepts and tools.

EC-Council CEH

2.2 Scanning Networks

CompTIA CySA+

2.2 Given a scenario, analyze output from vulnerability assessment tools.

NIST CSF

ID.AM-01 Inventories of hardware managed by the organization are maintained.

NIST 800-53

RA-5 Vulnerability Monitoring and Scanning

Key terms

Ping Sweep: A network scanning technique that sends ICMP echo requests to a range of IP addresses to identify which hosts are active on a network.
Port Scanning: A technique used to discover open ports and services available on a networked device.
Scanning: An active monitoring method used to discover devices, open ports, or services across IP ranges on a network.
Network Mapper: Network Mapper is an open-source security scanner used for network discovery, port scanning, service detection, and OS fingerprinting to assess the attack surface of networked systems.
Uptime Monitoring: A monitoring method that checks whether a system or web application is accessible and responding, measuring its availability.

Topics

Scanning Network Monitoring Interactive Categorize

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