Banner Grabbing

Banner grabbing is a process of collecting intelligence about IT assets and the services available on those assets.

Banners provide information such as the version of software running on a system. That intelligence can be used by IT and Security administrators, or by attackers, to get a sense of what vulnerabilities may be present on the asset. Banners provide limited value because the only security issues they might indicate are software version-related (e.g., CVEs) and even then banners won’t reflect that a system has been patched. Therefore, banner grabbing is prone to false-positives.