Ping Sweeps

Ping sweeps and ports scans are a common ways for hackers to attempt to break a network. As a system administrator this is a concern and for the boss this should not be a worry for him. The system administrator has a lot of steps to stop attempts from hackers to get any information by using the ping sweeps and ports scans. Once, the hackers are discourage they should move on to another site. A ping sweep is a basic networking scanning technique used to determine which range of IP addresses map to live hosts. A single ping will tell you whether one specified host computer exists on the network. A ping sweep consists of Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Echo requests sent to multiple hosts, this is done to determine which machines are alive and which ones aren’t. If a given address is live, it will return an ICMP Echo reply. Once the hacker knows which machines are alive, he or they can focus on which machines to attack and work from there. Not only hackers perform ping sweeps, system administrator may be trying to find out which machines are alive on a network for diagnostics reasons. Pings sweeps should be detected by a Intrusion Detection System, but to avoid potential DoS attacks, or intrusions, system adminstrators need to use other methods to test connectivity. Since using ping sweep can help hacker you can have the ping sweep turned on only when someone is testing the network connectivity. Port scanning is one of the most popular techniques attackers use to discover services they can break into. All machines connected to a Local Area Network or Internet run many services that listen at well-known and not so well known ports. A port scan helps the attacker find which ports are available. Essentially, a port scan consists of sending a message to each port, one at a time. The kind of response received indicates whether the port is used and can therefore be probed further for weakness. Typical ports scans can show up in system logs. A