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Difficulty: MediumVulnerability Scanning and Assessment

During a scheduled vulnerability assessment of an enterprise network segment, an automated scanner causes several legacy network switches to become unresponsive due to resource exhaustion from high-frequency port probing and service discovery requests. Which of the following adjustments should the security engineer implement to maintain visibility into these network devices without causing service disruptions?

  1. Reduce the scan throttle rate and switch to a non-intrusive scan profile for the affected network segment.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy host-based vulnerability scanning agents directly onto the switch firmware.
  3. C
    Place an inline web application firewall in front of the management interfaces to filter scanner traffic.
  4. D
    Configure SIEM correlation rules to suppress network disruption alerts generated during scanning windows.

Answer

Reduce the scan throttle rate and switch to a non-intrusive scan profile for the affected network segment.
Reducing the scan intensity (throttling) and switching to non-intrusive scan settings prevents resource exhaustion on sensitive hardware while allowing the scanner to gather essential service and version information safely.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the cause of system disruption during the assessment.
Aggressive, high-frequency port probes and intrusive checks exhausted the processing capacity of legacy switches.
Legacy network equipment often has limited CPU and memory buffers that cannot handle rapid connection requests.
2
Evaluate potential scan configuration changes to mitigate operational impact.
Adjusting scan speed (throttling) and disabling intrusive service exploitation tests prevents denial-of-service conditions.
Non-intrusive scans test for vulnerability signatures without executing aggressive payloads or overwhelming sockets.

Key Concept

Vulnerability Scanner Tuning and Safe Scanning Operations
Estimated Time:1m 15s
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Topics

Vulnerability Scanning and Assessment

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