Whether you’re a small or large business, ip scan needs to be conducted. It’s used to protect your network from inside and outside threats. And through this guide, we’ll help you find out if ip scanning is the right network maintenance method for you.

The purpose of ip scanning are:

• Recognizing valuable TCP and UDP network services that run on the targeted hosts.
• Recognizing filtering systems between the targeted hosts and users.
• Determine the operating systems by assessing IT responses.
• Evaluate the target’s TCP sequence number to determine the TCP spoofing and sequence attack.

In Depth: Network Scanning

To go further, network scanning consists of vulnerability scanning and port scanning.

Network port scanning is the method of sending data packets via the network to a computing system’s specific service port numbers. (for instance port 80 for HTTP, port 23 or Telnet and so on). This helps to identify the available network services on that system.

Vulnerability scanning is a method used to find vulnerabilities of computing systems found on a network. It helps detects weak spots in the application within the operating system (OS), which can either crash the system or compromise it for undesirable purposes.

Vulnerability scanning and ip scanning is an information gathering technique, but when conducted by anonymous individuals, these are viewed as a precursor to an attack.

Network scanning processes, like ping sweeps and port scans, returns details on which IP addresses are mapped to a host and what services they provide. Inverse mapping is another method that gathers information about IP addresses that don’t map to live host, which helps attackers focus on feasible access.

Network scanning is a method used by attackers to obtain information. On the footprint stage, the attacker creates a profile of the targeted organization. This includes data such as the domain name system, IP address range, and email servers.

On the scanning stage, the attacker obtains data about the system architecture, specific IP addresses that can be accessed online, and their OS and services running on each computer. In the enumeration stage, attackers collect data including user and group names, and routing tables, and so on.

Things to Remember

What’s important to remember is that vulnerability scanning should be apart of a vulnerability management plan. The scenarios are presented in the testing phase have to be reviewed, so new issues are quickly noticed and patched. Of course in the corresponding results and implemented fixes have to be well documented as part of a larger protection plan.

If your company doesn’t have an IT department, this might appear daunting. Even with its internal IT department, the bandwidth might not be there to start comprehensive testing. Then we suggest hiring an outside managed IT service organization.

They can review the results, handle vulnerability testing, and create a comprehensive protection plan to keep your network protected by from outside threats looking to obtain proprietary data.

Conclusion

To conclude, ip scans are useful in making your network more efficient. It will help you see what problems are present to your computers so your IT team can rectify them.

Make sure you use this software to your advantage as it will help keep your network organized and designed to handle any threat that appears.