Scanning is one of three components of intelligence gathering for an attacker. In the foot printing phase, the attacker creates a profile of the target organization, with information such as its domain name system (DNS) and e-mail servers, and its IP address range. Most of this information is available online. In the scanning phase, the attacker finds information about the specific IP addresses that can be accessed over the Internet, their operating systems, the system architecture, and the services running on each computer. In the enumeration phase, the attacker gathers information such as network user and group names, routing tables, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) data.
This was last updated in February 2002