ITPEC FE Morning October 2019 Question 42

Port Scanning Purpose — identify open services during the reconnaissance phase of an attack.

Port scanning sends probes to various ports on a target system to discover which services are running and potentially vulnerable. This is a preliminary investigation activity — the very first step before any actual exploitation.

Why not others:
- (a) Post-processing refers to covering tracks after an attack (e.g., clearing logs), not reconnaissance
- (c) Privilege acquisition happens after gaining initial access, when the attacker tries to escalate to admin/root
- (d) Performance stage of a fraudulent act involves exploiting stolen data — port scanning is pre-intrusion reconnaissance

Key rule: Port scanning = reconnaissance = preliminary investigation — always the earliest phase in an attack lifecycle.

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