Summary

We have now taken a deep dive into active reconnaissance: attackers face a very real chance of their activities being identified, putting them at risk. Technically, this must be balanced against the need to map a network, find open ports, and determine the operating system and applications that are installed. The real challenge for the attackers is to adopt stealthy scanning techniques in order to reduce the risk.

Manual approaches are normally used to create slow scans; however, this approach may not be always effective. Therefore, attackers take advantage of tools such as the Tor network and various proxy applications to hide their identity.

In the next chapter, we will focus more on using the vulnerability assessment tools and techniques, how scanners identify the vulnerabilities, and how to prepare for all the potential exploit candidates.