Not All SYN Packets Are Created Equal
By Daniel Miessler on May 18th, 2006: Tagged as Information Security | Security
During a recent assessment I noticed that I was getting back (or, not getting back, as it were) a filtered response to nmap and hping SYN scans. That’s normal enough for sites that drop incoming scan traffic, but the weird part was that if I used a standard connect scan, i.e. one that completes the three-way-handshake, I would get back a ton of open ports on the same host.
So if I did a “regular” scan, I’d send a SYN, get back a SYN-ACK, and then respond with an ACK. Fair enough, but if I sent just the SYN from nmap or tcpdump, the host would not respond at all. Well, after a couple of minutes of head-scratching, logic revealed the path to the truth:
Link: Not All SYN Packets Are Created Equal
