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Sec280 Week 1

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Submitted By carlrover
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Week 1

Boss,
Regarding your recent inquiry regarding ping sweeps and port scans, I wanted to provide some information to assuage any apprehension you may have had regarding the subject. Port scans and ping sweeps are common networking tools used by admins to perform common functions, such as checking to see if a server is running a particular service or if a desktop is on to receive an important update. It is also true that this same functionality can provide information to hackers who may use it for nefarious purposes, but you will see why that is less of a concern than it may seem.
Port scans, like I stated earlier, are used to discover what services are running on a target machine. Each service offered by our servers makes use of “ports” by which TCP/IP requests are sent; for example our company’s website accepts connections on port 80. Hackers use this information to determine what types of vulnerabilities they can make use of, which is why we only leave the ports we are using open, so that there are no unnecessary openings. Additionally, because the majority of our network is inaccessible to the outside world a hacker would already need to be inside our network to gain access to any of the critical systems.
Ping sweeps are often used in conjunction with Port scans in a similar discovery process. Ping sweeps instead are used to see what targets are available on the network. For instance, we may be on a 192.168.1.0 vlan with only a dozen or so machines. Typically the router or DHCP server will assign individual IP addresses in order by request, but sometimes they get out of order and skip numbers. A Ping sweep of the IP range 192.168.1.1 – 192.168.1.99 would revel which of the computers are currently on the network. Hackers often use this and port scan in conjunction with some prepackaged hacks (scripts) to quickly and automatically gain as much access as

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