Introduction to Network Vulnerability Scanning

In today's times, where hackers are prevalent and there are critical vulnerabilities discovered in various products every day, corporate networks are required to create procedures to identify, analyze, and mitigate vulnerabilities in real time. In this cookbook, we will be looking into various procedures and tools required to perform network security scanning and to understand and act on the results obtained.

This cookbook will equip any reader with a basic knowledge of computer networks with recipes to prepare, plan, and execute a Network Vulnerability Scan and determine the targets for a penetration test, or just to understand the security posture of the network. This will help budding penetration testers to conquer and learn to cook their methods to perform preliminary steps to identify vulnerabilities.

This chapter will introduce you to the basics of computer networks. It also dives into the procedures, uses, and various complexities to consider while performing a Network Vulnerability Scan. This chapter will equip you with basic knowledge of how to plan a Network Vulnerability Scan.

In this chapter, we will cover the following: 

• Basic networks and their components
• Network Vulnerability Scanning
• Flow of procedures used in Network Vulnerability Scanning
• Uses of performing a Network Vulnerability Scan
• Complexity of performing network scans
• How to devise a mitigation plan and respond