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Scanning is the phase in which you take the information gleaned from the footprinting phase and use it to target your attack much more percisely. The idea here is to act on the information from the prior phase, not to blunder around without purpose and set off alarms. Scanning means performing tasks like ping sweeps, port scans, observartions of facilities, and other similar tasks. One of the tools you will use is nmap, which is very useful for this purpose.