I. Identify the purpose of a vulnerability scanner and its purpose to determine security holes in a system.
II. Introduce students to a class of vulnerability scanners called black-box scanners or fuzzers that look for vulnerabilities in a program by feeding random input to the program or a network running the protocol.
III. Compare and contrast the differences between active and passive vulnerability scanners.
• Active vulnerability scanners initiate traffic on the network to determine security holes.
• Passive vulnerability scanners are ones that listens in on the network and determines vulnerable versions of both server and client software. They can also detect client-side vulnerabilities that active scanners cannot detect.
IV. Recognize that these tools simply monitor the network connections to and from a server to gain a list of vulnerable applications.