Network scan tool/appliance horror stories

Mon Oct 29 19:25:08 UTC 2012

On Mon, 29 Oct 2012, Pedersen, Sean wrote:

> We're evaluating several tools at the moment, and one vendor wants to 
> dynamically scan our network to pick up hosts - SNMP, port-scans, WMI, 
> the works. I was curious if anyone had any particularly gruesome horror 
> stories of scanning tools run amok.

If you have any overloaded/under-powered network gear, such as stateful 
firewalls and routers that do lots of NAT, you might find them very 
quickly, depending on how aggressive the scanning tool is.  There might 
also be devices out there that, while possibly lightly loaded, can reach 
some minimally documented resource threshold under a very aggressive scan, 
and subsequently tip over.

Also, if you're doing IPv6, the performance metrics for many network 
devices can be a bit more of a moving target.

jms