Abstract
Advances in communication technologies have drastically affected the realms of business, education, governments, and even the interaction of individuals. However, these advancements suffer greatly from hacking; as a result, many security countermeasures have been proposed. Nonetheless, the gap between successful hacking attempts and current security countermeasures is remarkable. The presence and success rate of hacking attempts are due to many reasons, including the emergence of relevant technologies (software and hardware) that aid hacking, complexity of hacking strategies that make them difficult to thwart, and neglecting the behavior of hackers in the design of hardware and software today. Fortunately, sophisticated hackers develop suitable hacking strategies for nominated victims based on gathered information through a prior step called scanning. Scanning provides hackers with necessary information including IP addresses, operating systems, running services and open ports in victims' infrastructures. In this article, we propose an active defense system that targets scanning properties and makes collecting necessary information about the protected infrastructure impractical, rendering the development of suitable hacking strategies against protected infrastructure nearly impossible.