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 /24-sized subnet for network 192.168.0.0/24
and ping each IP address once (-n 1
). Filters can be used | find “Reply"
, but this will only show the IPs you...