Patent ID: 7673043

Claim:
A method of conducting an automated vulnerability assessment on a computer network, comprising: sending a plurality of IP addresses to a network scanning process; assigning a first group of IP addresses from the plurality of IP addresses to a first subscanning process and assigning a second group of IP addresses from the plurality of IP addresses to a second subscanning process, the first subscanning process scanning the computer network with a first selected sequence of IP addresses from the first group of IP addresses and receiving and storing a first set of responses from the computer network, the second subscanning process scanning the computer network with a second selected sequence of IP addresses from the second group of IP addresses and receiving and storing a second set of responses from the computer network, the first selected sequence of IP addresses and the second selected sequence of IP addresses being applied in parallel; and providing the first set of responses and the second set of responses as data for performing a vulnerability assessment of the computer network; wherein an IP address shuffler performs a deterministic shuffling process on a group of IP addresses.