Protection against attacks is important, but attackers often use vulnerabilities and network tools to gather information about your network to plan an attack. It is often easier to prevent an attacker from learning important details about your network than to defend against an attack designed to exploit your particular network.

Attacks are often tailored to the hardware or operating system of the target, so reconnaissance is often the first step. The IP addresses of the hosts, the open ports, and the operating systems the hosts are running is invaluable information to an attacker. Probing your network can be as simple as an attacker performing an address sweep or port scan to a more involved operation like sending TCP packets with invalid combinations of flags to see how your firewall reacts.