Discovering live hosts on a network

Host discovery is an important part of ethical hacking and penetration testing, as it enables an ethical hacker to identify which systems on a network are discoverable and live within an organization. If your targeted host is offline, you won’t be able to identify security vulnerabilities and send an exploit to it.

There are various techniques and tools that help ethical hackers efficiently discover live hosts on a network and identify open ports and running services. This section will help you develop the skills and knowledge to perform host discovery as an ethical hacker.

Performing passive scanning with Netdiscover

Netdiscover is a pre-installed tool within Kali Linux that enables ethical hackers to either actively scan a network range or passively listen and analyze network packets to discover live hosts. Active scanning sends probes to each device within the network to determine which hosts are online. When using passive-mode...