What is Host Scanning?
In Simple words, it is like finding out which houses have people living in them on your street. Essentially, when you want to scan a network, you are knocking at the doors of different IP addresses and seeing if there’s an active computer or device behind that responds. The purpose of host scanning is to generate a map of all alive hosts on the network before any additional analysis is performed. It will help you know which devices are connected and what IP addresses need concentrating on.
Since host scanning provides valuable information about actual active and reachable targets, it is typically among the first stages of network reconnaissance and penetration testing. It’s one of the basic tools used by cybersecurity professionals and ethical hackers to evaluate network security.
15 Most Useful Host Scanning Commands – Kali Linux
- 1. Active Reconnaissance with Nmap Command
- 2. Find Alive Hosts with Netdiscover
- 3. Find Top 10 Open Ports with Nmap (Fast Scan)
- 4. Scanning with Unicornscan
- 5. TCP Syn Scan with Nmap
- 6. Scanning with HPING3
- 7. Port Scanning with Netcat
- 8. Version Scanning with Nmap
- 9. Firewall Bypass
- 10. Scanning with Masscan
- 11. Specific Port Scanning
- 12. Open Ports Scanning
- 13. Active Remote Hosts Scanning
- 14. OS fingerprinting
- 15. Performing a detailed scan
15 Most Useful Host Scanning Commands – Kali Linux
Scanning and identifying live hosts on a network is one of the crucial activities for an ethical hacker or expert. One of the powerful tools in Kali Linux, a popular penetration testing distribution, is Nmap which has a variety of host scanning techniques. To gather valuable information about targets, detect vulnerabilities, and ultimately secure systems and networks, one needs these scanning commands. Mastering these commands would not only provide beginners with basic knowledge for doing their network reconnaissance effectively but would also help professionals conduct better security assessments on networks.