ITPEC FE Morning October 2020 Question 43

Enumerating the services on the server to confirm that none runs needlessly — a port scanner probes which ports accept connections.

A port scanner sends connection attempts to a range of port numbers on the target host and reports which ones answer as open. Each open port means a service is listening there: 80 for HTTP, 443 for HTTPS, 22 for SSH, 21 for FTP and so on. In an inspection of a web server, the list is compared with the services the server actually needs, and every extra one is an entry point for attack that should be stopped.

Answer (c)

Why not others:

• •(a) — logging in with a valid user ID and examining the contents is a manual review from inside the server; a port scanner works over the network, without logging in, and never looks at contents
• •(b) — analysing the access history is log analysis, which finds misuse that has already happened
• •(d) — checking with the operator how user IDs are managed is an interview-based check of account administration against the policy, not a network probe

Key rule: A port scanner answers "which services can be reached over the network?"; every open port that is not needed is attack surface to close.

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