As andre23 said, these 2 things are simply information collection / mapping mechanisms, not hacking mechanism, but they are usually precursors to hack attempts.
The impact on the company from the outside? Besides what andre mentioned, it also generates alerts and causes security staff to occupy their time handling the alerts. Depending on the company's security policy, an admin may have to add the source of the scan to a blacklist in their firewalls.
Overall, people who are scanning networks and otherwise poking around where they should not cause companies extra cost in security staff, firewalls and intrusion detection systems. But the scanning itself is not the threat, it is just the early warning.
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by: andre23Posted on 2009-11-01 at 11:38:34ID: 25715062
ping sweeps and port scans will show an attacker which hosts and ports are active.
there are 2 problems with this things:
1. it produces load on the network and the hosts - so the network and/or hosts can be slowed down or maybe even fail due to timeouts on there production services or due to the load - depending on the configuration
2. a potential attacker will get information about the network - which hosts and which ports are active. these information can be used to attack specific services
regards,
andre