Network scan tool/appliance horror stories

nick hatch nicholas.hatch at gmail.com
Tue Oct 30 00:14:56 UTC 2012


On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Pedersen, Sean <Sean.Pedersen at usairways.com
> wrote:

> I was curious if anyone had any particularly gruesome horror stories of
> scanning tools run amok.
>

A particular model of ShoreTel voice switches I used to administer (running
VxWorks, IIRC) would reliably lock up hard when hit with nmap's OS/service
detection on a particular port. Required pulling the plug to restore
service.

The truly odd thing was that it didn't seem like a resource exhaustion
issue, it could be triggered with a single well-crafted probe or two.

After several long nights of painful troubleshooting with their level III
support, we came to the conclusion that if it hurts, you probably shouldn't
do it, and mitigating ACLs were put in place.

-n



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