Scanning techniques

If you look up the definition of scanning, you will note that it has to do with looking at all parts of a particular subject carefully to detect something. Within ethical hacking, scanning is an integral part of your methodology.

During the reconnaissance phase of your ethical hack, you would have gathered information about your target. For you to obtain a more in-depth view of your target, you would need to perform various scanning activities.

Consider web scanners. These can help you gain insight into the vulnerabilities of the web server or its components. Network scanners can help identify hosts that are online, open ports, running services, and more. Vulnerability scanners focus purely on gaining insight into vulnerabilities that exist in your target. Most modern vulnerability scanners can scan diverse targets that range from web servers to mobile platforms.

In this chapter, we will focus on a few scanning techniques. In the next section, we will begin...