Introduction
LANguard is a network scanning utility used for detecting computers, servers, routers, printers, and many other components on a network. It can also be used to test different vulnerabilities on a network to see what needs to be patched up. It can also be used to identify open ports and be used to identify network shares.

LANguard uses
Many network administrators use LANgaurd to detect what is on their network on a daily basis, to make sure no person is connecting, that should not be on the network. A hacker (or even cracker) may decide to use it to see if there is any vulnerability that they may wish to exploit for destructive purposes or to test security arrangements.

Prevention
This can be used by any script kidding who wishes to see what is on the network, and there is very little anyone can do to prevent some person from scanning your network. The best thing you can do to prevent it is to make sure (in a computer lab situation) they don’t have rights to install new programs. Make sure your network is secure anyways, a person does a scan, and there are no holes, there is very little they can do to you. This software may not be the most feature rich and may be considered more of a discovery software than a script kiddie software.

Our use of LANgaurd
When we used LANgaurd, we scanned the ITAS network; we detected every student’s computers, servers, printers and switches. In the ITAS network we discover a lot of holes in security, which if we wanted to we could have taken advantage very easily. A lot of students have no applied updates in ages, and had a lot of open FTP ports. It even showed the MAC addresses of all the computers, we could have cloned our MAC address to be the same as the year one switch and cause a big mess for the ITAS network administer to clean up. The scanner even showed usernames of users who have been logged on the systems during the scan.

Conclusion
There is not much you can do to prevent people from trying to poke and scan your network, just make sure that you have all your updates at 100%, and you do not have ports open that you don’t need open. Use LANgaurd to do a scan on your network every so often to see if you can see any holes in it, so that you can fix it up and prevent an attack from a cracker, which can cause some serious damage. Then again, if someone is going to go after your network, they probably won't be using common holes to enter it.