Which protocol or diagnostic tool helps you determine how many hops away a network is and can be exploited by an attacker?

SSH is a secure remote shell protocol used for encrypted administration, not a diagnostic tool that reveals hop counts or network topology.

Traceroute works by sending packets with progressively increasing TTL values; each router that decrements the TTL to zero returns an ICMP Time Exceeded message, revealing its address and round-trip time. This allows an operator - or an attacker - to enumerate every hop along a path and determine network distance in hops. Attackers exploit traceroute output to map internal network infrastructure, identify routing devices, and plan further targeted attacks.

Ping tests basic reachability and round-trip time to a single destination but does not reveal intermediate hops or hop count along the path.

TCP is a transport-layer protocol governing reliable data delivery and is not itself a diagnostic tool used to count hops.