The Art of Network Penetration Testing

2 Discovering network hosts

This chapter covers

• Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP)
• Using Nmap to sweep IP ranges for live hosts
• Performance tuning Nmap scans
• Discovering hosts using commonly known ports
• Additional host discovery methods

As you’ll recall, the first phase in the four-phase network penetration testing (pentesting) methodology is the information-gathering phase. The goals and objectives for this phase are to gather as much information as possible about your target network environment. This phase is further broken up into three main components or sub-phases. Each sub-phase focuses on discovering information or intelligence about network targets within the following separate categories:

• Hosts —Sub-phase A: host discovery ...