Hi tarunthenut,
The scan needed to be carried out externally, and not from within the
network to identify hosts and ports exposed to the Internet.
The problem compounded cause of the following limitations :
1. ICMP was not allowed in the network
This isn't a big problem
2. The IP range was to be scanned every month for the entire port range
fro=
m
1-65535 for TCP & UDP
Scanning TCP using SYN scanning should be quite fast (make sure you're
running nmap as root, otherwise it won't use SYN scanning), however there
isn't much in the way of fast UDP scanning due to its connectionless nature,
hence the scanner needs to send out a UDP packet and hope one comes back (or
a 'port unreachable' ICMP message).
After searching for a suitable scanner which could scan such a large range
in reasonable time, I could think of only nmap, nessus, superscan and ISS.
But because of the limitations stated above,all the tools took a huge
amount of time (ran into month).
You might want to check out Unicornscan. I haven't used it myself, but I've
heard it's quite fast: http://www.unicornscan.org/main.html.
Cheers,
Steve Micallef
http://www.binarypool.com
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