Ethical Hacking Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 3

Ethical Hacking - Essay Example It can be used to protect an organization against an attack because it spots out and potentially prevents intrusions that breach the system’s firewalls or those that occur behind the local area network (LAN) or the firewall (IATAC, 2009, p.3). Thus, IDS can provide organizations real-time or near-real-time monitoring of a host or a network and defend them from hacking. IDS cannot always detect footprinting stages. The wrong results in an IDS are categorized into two kinds: false positives and false negatives (IATAC, 2009, p.4). False positives happen when an IDS wrongly sees a problem with benign traffic (IATAC, 2009, p.4). False negatives take place when malicious traffic is not recognized by the IDS (IATAC, 2009, p.4). When this happens, hackers’ footprinting efforts can enter the system and evade the systematic monitors of an IDS. Also, an IDS cannot evade successful social engineering tactics. These tactics gathers useful information about the system that can be used to determine vulnerabilities and other useful information. Two scanning and enumeration tools that the organization can use are Port Scanning and Null Session tools. Port scanning can be done by Nmap- it is a program made for network mapping tool. Nmap does different network functions, such as fingerprinting a system, finding ports that are common to a specific network device, and determining the servers, such as recognizing that System B is actually a Solaris server. The Windows Server Message Block (SMB) protocol provides free information. Null Sessions are not on by default in Win XP, Server 2003, Vista, and Windows 7 but open in Win 2000 and NT. Some of the Null Session Tools are Dumpsec, Winfo, Sid2User, and NBTenun 3.3. Scanning and enumeration can be taken to the next level through using vulnerability assessment tools that respond to scanning and enumeration activities. Vulnerability