A ping sweep, also known as an ICMP sweep, is a network scanning technique used to determine which IP addresses within a specified range correspond to live, active hosts (such as computers or network devices) on a network.
The process involves sending ICMP echo requests (commonly known as “pings”) to multiple IP addresses. If a device at a given address is active, it will respond with an ICMP echo reply. By analyzing which addresses respond, the ping sweep identifies which devices are currently online within the scanned range.