Ping sweeps and Port scans

Let's try to understand ping before we discuss ping sweep.

• Ping: Ping is a tool commonly used to find the status of a host on a network. Ping is based on the ICMP protocol. When a Ping process request is sent out as an ICMP echo to the target host, it replies with an ICMP echo reply.
• Ping Sweep: Ping sweep is a technique that can be used to find out which hosts are alive in a network for a defined IP range. Network admins who allow ICMP are vulnerable to ICMP based attacks.

Multiple tools are available for ping sweeps. You can even develop your own tool with a small script. Here is a simple example of how to run a ping sweep from a Windows machine: FOR /L loop, which is a counter, the variable is %i. It starts at 1 and increases by 1 with each iteration through the loop, going up to 255. I want to ping through a ...