Exploring active scanning techniques

As an aspiring ethical hacker and penetration tester, it’s essential to develop a solid foundation on understanding how to leverage active scanning techniques to efficiently discover and profile targeted systems on an organization’s network. Unlike passive reconnaissance, active reconnaissance focuses on sending special probes directly to a targeted system to retrieve specific information, which isn’t available from OSINT data source. In addition, active scanning helps us identify accurate information about the target, while some OSINT data sources may not have the latest version of the information.

Many organizations focus on securing their perimeter network and sometimes do not apply equal focus on securing their internal network (of the cyberattacks I’ve encountered in my career, 90% usually originate from inside the network). Due to this, many organizations think the attacker will launch their attack from the...