Hardware Component Inventory

Hardware component inventorying identifies and records the hardware items in the organization's architecture.

Synonyms: Hardware Component Discovery , and Hardware Component Inventorying .

How it works

Administrators collect information on hardware devices such as peripherals, NICs, processors, and memory devices that are components of the computers in their architecture using a variety of administrative and management tools that query for this information. In some cases, where such queries are not supported or provide specific information of interest, an administrator may also collect this information through remote adminstration tools and system commands, either manually or using scripts.

Considerations

• Scanning and probing techniques using mapping tools can result in side effects to information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems.
• An adversary conducting network enumeration may engage in activities that parallel normal hardware inventorying activities, but would require escalating to admin privileges for most of the operations requiting administrative tools

Examples

• Bus discovery
  • Admin-scripted PCI Bus inventory using ssh and pciutils
• Application-layer discovery
  • Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) collects MIB information
  • Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) collects CIM information
    • Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)
    • Windows Management Infrastructure (MI)