You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry...

...Angry Ip Scanner that is. That's right, no pre-amble today, just straight to the nitty gritty. Angry Ip Scanner is basically what it sounds like. It is a tool that lets you scan an entire network for hosts simultaneously using ping. Once you have a list of live nodes on the network, you can then go through and do a port scan. Hackers use tools like this to scan for hosts, then check for open ports. They can then use other tools at their disposal to exploit those open ports and get access to your system. This makes a very good case for disabling ICMP requests on your firewall.

I'll tell you what made me think of this tool today though. It wasn't really hacking per se. What happened was I had a user call in from one of our remote offices. She was turning on a PC that hadn't been turned on in months and for some reason it had fallen off the domain due to the lack of communication with the server. Since it was no longer trusted on the domain, she could no longer login. I had her tell me the computer's name, but DNS wasn't finding it either. Since she couldn't login, I couldn't walk her through finding the IP Address for me to try connecting to it that way. So what does one do in this circumstance?

Well, I busted out Angry Ip Scanner, and I plugged in the IP Address range for her subnet. In less than a minute, I had a complete list of all live nodes on the network, including her computer complete with IP address. I was able to login through IP, and rejoin it to the domain.

There are many other uses for this type of utility. If you can think of some more, please leave a comment. If you have never used it before, you have got to try it out!