Note: Make sure that the scans are conducted in the networks where you are allowed to do so with appropriate permissions. Since the adoption of IPv6 has started, sysadmins and SREs who would like to look into their IPv6 networks can take a look at some of the open source IPv6 scanners that we will be listing in this article.

Many popular network scanners are used by sysadmins and SREs for scanning and discovery of IPv4 hosts and services within their network, whether for the purpose of inventorying the network or to spot security issues in the network. With IPv6 however, even when taking a very liberal estimate, a scan of all IPv6 addresses would take hundreds, possibly hundreds of thousands of years. For instance, using some tools (and with the requisite bandwidth), an attacker could scan the entire public IPv4 address space in less than an hour. IPv6 provides many security benefits by design.

IPv6 was introduced as a replacement for IPv4 foreseeing the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space at some point in the future.

Advanced ip scanner ipv6