How To Monitor Your Network Through SoftPerfect Network Scanner -A Comprehensive Review

Today, the goodwill of internet is severely affected by intrusions, hacking and phishing stuffs. So, being a network administrator the ultimate headache is to maintain a fool proof network where no one can access without proper authorization. Software & hardware Firewall (preferably with DMZ) can protect your internal network from outside hackers. But how about inside jobs?

Often an apparently secured network can be easily compromised by insiders. To protect against attacks from inside we need to restrict access to internal resources on a as need basis and on the basis of proper authorization.

We need a way to scan our network for open ports, find out shared resources which and in general find out vulnerabilities in our network before the hackers do. So, a network scanner is essentially the order of the day.

Today, I am going to introduce you to a not-so-well-known but a quality network scanner - SoftPerfect Network Scanner

Description

According to the makers,

SoftPerfect Network Scanner is a free multi-threaded IP, NetBIOS and SNMP scanner with a modern interface and several advanced features. It is intended for both system administrators and general users who are interested in computer security. The program pings computers, scans for listening TCP ports and displays which types of resources are shared on the network (including system and hidden).

Additionally, it allows you to mount shared folders as network drives, You can browse them using Windows Explorer too. What interests me more is that SoftPerfect Network Scanner can also check for a user-defined port and report back if one is open.

It also resolves host names and auto-detects your local and external IP range if asked.This software also supports wake on LAN and remote shutdown.

Other Key features

• It pings computers with a fair speed and is very stable.
• The best thing for all your employees out there is it does not require administrative privileges. But beware of your boss. lol.
• Detects hardware (MAC) addresses even across routers.
• It can detect hidden shared folders (normally invisible on the network) and write accessible shares.
• Scans for listening TCP ports and SNMP services and comes with more information than most of the other scanners.
• Retrieves currently logged-on users.
• Can launch external third party applications.
• Exports results to HTML, XML, CSV and TXT so you understand that it is very much portable.
• It is absolutely free, requires no installation, and does not contain any adware/spyware/malware

Our verdict

We have used it thoroughly and it came in really handy for us. If you are an ardent fan of Angry ip scanner for speed then this one can be a little disappointing because this is a bit slow to show the scanning results and it froze on me at least couple of times. Again there is this part too that when you save the list it doesn’t show the ips that don’t respond. But all said and done, these are very minor when your security is concerned and we better go for a reliable and resourceful one than being steadfast. SoftPerfect Network Scanner is one hell of a network monitoring software with lots of important features. I will vote for it.