Operating System Fingerprinting
Open ports that are discovered during the port scanning phase need to be further investigated. The mere existence of an open port does not mean a vulnerability exists. Thus, attackers must probe for more information to determine whether vulnerabilities that exist can be exploited.
The open ports that are discovered during port mapping provide clues about which OS the target is running. Determining the OS that is running on a specific target is the purpose of OS fingerprinting. Once an OS is identified, it is possible to better focus the attacks that come later. After all, an attacker doesn’t want to waste time launching Windows exploits against Linux computers, and vice versa. To identify an OS, two different ...
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