Free ARP Scanner

I can never stress enough that you need to ‘get to know’ your tools for a bunch of reasons, here are a few examples;

- Understand how the tool behaves on the network

- Ensure that no extra communication is going on

- Better understand when it doesn’t ‘work’

- What changes network equipment or firewalls may require to get your tool to work

In this article I want to show you a cool utility from Nirsoft.net called Wireless network watcher http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/wireless_network_watcher.html Just a note that I’m not paid by Nirsoft, nor have I been asked by them to include their utility in my article.

This utility scans your network using ARP instead of the more popular pings that most tools use. In the video you will see that no icmp packets were sent and it still able to identify the host name. Having the MAC address is also helpful and having the ability to run this from the command line is a bonus on top of the fact that this is a portable tool, so you can put it on a USB key.