Security Basics mailing list archives

Network scanning: Continued (newbie)


From: "Christos Gioran" <himicos () freemail gr>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 23:17:41 +0300

Hi all,

The recent conversation titled network scanning inspired me to ask the
following:

Say an imaginary attacker snifs traffic of a network, having plugged in
through a rogue cable. One of the solutions proposed would be to ping sweep
the network on regular time intervals checking on the responses. Suppose the
attacker raises a firewall with a simple ruleset like (not exact iptables
syntax):

input --protocol any  -j ACCEPT
output --protocol any -j DROP

and to be paranoid add this:

input --protocol icmp -j DROP

In iptables, if i am correct, the target DROP causes the packet to be silently
dropped. Then this would remedy this approach, correct?? The idea is that  all
outgoing packets will be dropped and only incoming traffic will be monitored,
as the attacker desires. This having been said, is the use of special wiring
anymore  required?

Forgive me for bringing the subject up again but when i originally posted this
question (2003-08-13) i was ignored. If i did something wrong please let me
know. The posting mentioning the ICMP approach follows.

cheers

CG


One thing that you could do is use a tool that would send an ICMP
packet to all possible addresses in your particular network.  That
won't detect all connecting hosts, in particular if someone jacks in
to sniff only, but that assumes that your network is hub based.  If
your network is switch based then people will have a hard time
logging in and sniffing without being detected as they'd normally
have to ARP poison the switch or do something else that would be
detectable.


So... the simple 99% answer is, ping all possible IP addresses once,
if you get a response from an address thats not supposed to be
there... well... then you'll know.

Also, if you use DHCP then you could watch the DHCP log for new
systems... thats not super difficult either.



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