---
title: "Network Mapping"
canonical: https://trickest.com/glossary/network-mapping
description: "Network mapping builds a picture of the hosts, subnets, and routes in a network to show how systems connect and which paths an attacker could traverse."
---

# Network Mapping

Network mapping builds a model of a network's structure: which hosts are live, how they group into subnets, what gateways and routes connect them, and where trust boundaries sit. The output is a topology you can reason about, not just a flat list of IP addresses. It answers how traffic flows and which segments can reach which.

The discipline matters on both sides of an engagement. A defender uses a map to spot segments that should be isolated but are not, or to find hosts that bridge a sensitive zone to the rest of the estate. An attacker uses the same map to plan [lateral movement](/glossary/lateral-movement), tracing a path from an initial foothold toward a high-value target one reachable host at a time.

Mapping draws on several techniques. [Asset discovery](/glossary/asset-discovery) finds the hosts, [port scanning](/glossary/port-scanning) reveals which services each one exposes, and [service fingerprinting](/glossary/service-fingerprinting) identifies the software and versions behind those ports. Together they fill in the nodes and edges of the picture.

In a Trickest workflow, you chain these stages so discovered hosts flow into scanning and fingerprinting automatically, and the map refreshes on a schedule as the network changes rather than going stale after a one-time sweep.

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_Markdown source of https://trickest.com/glossary/network-mapping._