Week 4

Ethical Hacking Week 4: Target Discovery & OS Fingerprinting 🎯🔍 In Week 4 of Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing , we officially started mapping out our targets. Before you can exploit a system, you have to find it and figure out exactly what it’s running. This phase is all about Target Discovery and OS Fingerprinting . Finding the Target (Discovery) We looked at the command-line tools used to identify live machines on a network. The classic ping sweep is great, but we also explored arping , fping , hping , and nbtscan for mapping out local networks. For modern setups, we even touched on IPv6 discovery tools like alive6 . OS Fingerprinting (Who are we talking to?) Once we know a machine is alive, we need to know what operating system it’s running so we can look up vulnerabilities. There are two ways to do this: Active Fingerprinting: We send carefully crafted packets to the target and analyze the unique ways its TCP/IP stack responds. Tools like Nmap do this perfectly. It’s fast, b