Case Study: Ping Sweeps and Port Scans

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9/8/2013 SEC280 Case Study Week 1 Case Study: Ping Sweeps and Port Scans Ping sweeps and port scans are not an immediate threat to the company. While it may be used by an attacker to build a profile against the company, it can also be used by an administrator to gather information about the company. Although it is not an immediate threat, it should still be monitored for potential threats because it is a common way for hackers to attempt to break a network. In the following document, more will be discussed about what ping sweeps and port scans are and how they are used to gather information about a company’s network. What is a ping sweep and how does it work? A ping sweep is a, “diagnostic technique used in computing to see what range of IP addresses are in use by live hosts, which are usually computers.” (What is a Ping Sweep?, 2013). Using just the ping command in a command prompt, you can verify whether a host is alive or not if it returns the ping. In a ping sweep, this is done on a larger scale to see which IPs are active on a network. Doing this, the attacker will know which computers are alive and which aren’t so they know where they should concentrate their attacks on. On another note, network administrators also uses ping sweeps when they are scanning the network to troubleshoot problems or to identify which IP addresses are taken. For example, a company may need to set up some new network printers, so the network administrator need to assign the printers static IP addresses. To avoid any conflict with existing IPs on the network, they will do a ping sweep to determine which IPs are available. What is a port scan and how does it work? A port scan is simple to perform and all it does is connect to different ports on a machine to check whether or not it is active. The port scan’s task is to target the services running on a target machine and

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