is it safe to us network discovery software?

[mammador]

There are lots of network discovery apps out there, but do they get singled out as intrusions?

Coming to think of it, why should network admins let their network be discovered by anybody with a tablet or smartphone with wifi?

 

[seepy83]

There are lots of network discovery apps out there, but do they get singled out as intrusions?

They could throw up a flag depending on what IDS/IPS systems are in place on the network.

Coming to think of it, why should network admins let their network be discovered by anybody with a tablet or smartphone with wifi?

Most companies don't let random devices connect to their WiFi. And installing/using a port/protocol scanner like nmap on your work computer is probably against policy (if you even have the ability to install it to begin with).

 

[spidey07]

And depending on the network those tools can overload devices so they should be used with caution. If their routers, circuits or firewalls or other pieces are stressed, those tools can stress them even more to the point of causing a problem.

And as mentioned they are quickly flagged by IDS systems.

 

[mammador]

Well I'm asking since on Android market there are a number of network discovery apps, and from a phone/tablet you can discovery all routers and nodes on a wifi subnet. But given this, I was thinking whether this was safe, or if network admins would want any old Joe to view their entire subnet.

 

[spidey07]

If it didn't hurt anything, stayed on it's local subnet and it wasn't malicious I wouldn't care.

If it starts brute forcing SNMP or doing a lot of scanning (either locally or god forbid starts walking the entire network) then we've got a problem.

But information gathering like this can be considered a form of malicious activity, and plenty of places would frown strongly against use.

 

[Red Squirrel]

They are normally fine, but they may raise flags so unless you are a network/IT admin I would not do it. One time one of my coworkers ran a network discovery to do an audit as we were troubleshooting an issue or something, I forget. It was basically an advanced port scanner, it would search for specific services then pull up the info.

While the app was running all our printers started spitting out tons of random crap. To this day I don't know if it's just a coincidence, or if it's the app that caused it, but we stopped the app to be on the safe side.

This network was a mess though, so many security issues, but the IT manager's priority was making everything user friendly, not secure.

 

[Nothinman]

In most cases it won't cause any harm unless you use something, although there are always exceptions for very specialized devices like fibre switches that may freak out if they get hit with a port scan.