Wether it be nmap port scan, Nessus discovery scan, or any scanner that tries to find open ports on a server, you have probably heard atleast once, “hey! that scan broke my server/app”. I must admit I have.
I was reading Fyodor’s book on nmap and want to share some interesting quotes.
This is on page 19 of the book that talks about port scanning systems.
“…no application, host, or network component should ever crash based on an Nmap scan. If they do, that is a bug in the system which should be repaired by the vendor.”
“…poorly written applications, TCP/IP stacks, and even operating systems have been demonstrated to crash…”
“…finding that a machine crashes from a certain scan is valuable information. After all, attackers can do anything Nmap can do…”
“Reducing the ports/hosts scanned reduces the number of state entries and thus might help those sorry devices stay up.”
This sums up my beliefs exactly. If I scan a system and it crashes, they need to fix it. I am not exploiting or doing anything nobody else can do.
In adition to the descriptive words of these systems used by Fyodor, I would add the word finicky.
