Helping Hand Questions for PT0-002

Sinkholing is a technique used by security teams to redirect malicious or unwanted network traffic to a controlled destination, such as a black hole or a honeypot. This can help prevent or mitigate attacks, analyze malware behavior, or isolate infected hosts. If the SOC used sinkholing on the penetration tester’s IP address, it means that they detected the tester’s activity and blocked it from reaching the client’s network. This indicates that the planning process failed to ensure all teams were notified about the penetration testing engagement, which could have avoided this situation.

the NMAP flag (-sn) which is for host discovery and returns that kind of NMAP output. And the AWK command selects column 5 ({print $5}) which obviously carries the returned IP of the host in the NMAP output.

This command will generate the results shown in the image and transform them into a list of active hosts for further analysis. The command consists of three parts:

nmap -sn 192.168.0.1-254: This part uses nmap, a network scanning tool, to perform a ping scan (-sn) on the IP range 192.168.0.1-254, which means sending ICMP echo requests to each IP address and checking if they respond.

grep “Nmap scan”: This part uses grep, a text filtering tool, to search for the string “Nmap scan” in the output of the previous part and display only the matching lines. This will filter out the lines that show the start and end time of the scan and only show the lines that indicate the status of each host.

awk ‘{print $5}’: This part uses awk, a text processing tool, to print the fifth field ($5) of each line in the output of the previous part. This will extract only the IP addresses of each host and display them as a list.

The final output will look something like this:

192.168.0.1 192.168.0.12 192.168.0.17 192.168.0.34

This command will scan the host 192.168.1.20 on port 80 using the following options:

-A: This option enables OS detection, version detection, script scanning, and traceroute. This will help to determine if the host is running an approved version of Linux and a patched version of Apache, as well as other information about the host and the network path.

-T4: This option sets the timing template to aggressive, which speeds up the scan by increasing the number of parallel probes, reducing the timeouts, and assuming faster responses.

-p80: This option specifies the port to scan, which is 80 in this case. Port 80 is commonly used for HTTP services, such as Apache web server.