Ping Sweeps and Port Scans
Principles of Information-Systems Security
Attacks on a network can happen at any time and hackers are known to be ruthless. One of the first steps of an attack is done by the use of ping sweeping and port scanning. I will begin to go into detail of a description of ping sweeping, a description of port scanning, and what my opinion is if someone were to use these techniques onto a companies network. First we will begin with what ping sweeping is and how it works.
To begin with, a ping sweep simply sends an ICMP echo request, or ping, to the target machine. The ICMP Echo request is are signals sent out to an IP address requesting a response back, if the machine sends a signal or a response back then it is reachable (Branch, 2013). The ping will wait for a response from any machine that is using the IP address specified in the ping and will let the person sending the ping know if the port the machine is using on the network is open or not. Ping sweeps are designed for network teams to figure out troubleshooting issues, and licensing issues (Conklin 2010, pg. 12-13). However, the information they give could be bad for a network if it falls into the wrong hands.
After you perform a ping sweep, typically you would perform a port scan. Using the port scan technique will help identify the ports that are open on the machine, and what types of services that may be running (Conklin 2010, pg. 12-13). You can use operating system fingerprinting to determine the operating system on the machine. You can also find available services, specific applications, or send packets. There are many techniques that can be used to send the formatted packets to ports on a machine that will view the response. The machine must be powered on in order for there to be any type of response. Furthermore, port scans are originally made for seeing a machine on a network to probe a machine.
After both ping sweeping and port scanning are done, an attacker would...