A review of network vulnerabilities scanning tools
Andrea Tundis, Wojciech Mazurczyk, Max Mühlhäuser · 2018
The rapid growth of the Internet in the last years has brought many advantages in the modern society in terms of communication and information sharing. Beside that, new and complex issues are emerging due to the network flexibility, openness and systems integration. The vulnerabilities of systems are the basis of these issues. Unfortunately, such vulnerabilities in the Internet can affect not only virtual environments in an isolated way but this can have serious repercussions in the real world. That is why, identifying new system vulnerability represents an important information for malicious parties. Currently, several tools (e.g. Shodan or Censys), which automatically scan the Internet, are available. They first scan the whole IPv4 public address range and ports in a distributed and random manner and then the obtained results are published on the publicly accessible websites. Such information can be later used for the benign or malicious purposes. In the latter case the main advantage for the potential attackers is that they gain reconnaissance data without even directly contacting the targeted device. Additionally, a large list of potential victims sharing the same vulnerability can be rapidly acquired. In this context, this paper aims at providing an overview of various publicly available network vulnerabilities scanning tools. In particular, first the main scanning tools are identified and classified. Then their main features are described and finally their advantages and disadvantages are highlighted.