Banner grabbing

Banner grabbing is a technique that identifies the services that are running on a system. For example, let's say you did a basic port scan on a target and you saw port 80 is open, this means there is a web server providing HTTP service. However, if we would like to determine/retrieve the web server platform (IIS, Apache, or Nginx) and its version number, we would have to perform banner grabbing.

Exercise using Telnet to banner-grab

In this exercise, we re going to use Telnet to determine the type of web server on a target system. We'll be able to see whether it's IIS, Apache, or Nginx. Let's begin:

1. Open a command console.
2. At the console, enter the following command:

telnet <target IP...