The onsite security consultant will normally start with consulting existing documentation such as IP and asset lists, software and hardware inventory documentation and tracking systems in order to compile a list of assets and their IP addresses. The task is to find all of the assets of the system under consideration.
On a regular IT network, discovery of assets is often accomplished with scanning tools, running ping sweeps and ARP scans. NMAP is one such tool that can perform asset or host discovery scans. The following nmap command will run a ping sweep (-sP) of the 172.20.7.0/24 subnet:
# nmap -sP 172.20.7.0/24 Starting Nmap 7.40 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2017-06-04 15:54 Eastern ...
