A penetration tester executed a vulnerability scan against a publicly accessible host and found a web server that is vulnerable to the DROWN attack. Assuming this web server is using the IP address…

The command `openssl s_client -tls1_2 -connect 127.212.31.17:443` uses the correct client-side subcommand (`s_client`) to initiate a handshake with the target server, forcing TLS 1.2 negotiation to confirm the server's protocol support baseline. If the server only supports TLS 1.2 and SSLv2 is not actually enabled, the DROWN finding would be confirmed as a false positive. This syntax is the standard method for manually verifying a server's SSL/TLS configuration against a scanner result.

The `-ssl2` flag attempts to connect using the deprecated SSLv2 protocol, which would confirm the vulnerability rather than rule it out as a false positive, and `ss12` is not a valid OpenSSL flag.

The `-ssl3` flag tests SSLv3 connectivity rather than SSLv2, so it does not directly address the DROWN vulnerability and cannot be used to verify whether that specific scanner finding is a false positive.

The `s_server` subcommand puts OpenSSL into server mode to accept incoming connections, not client mode, so it cannot be used to connect to and test an external target host.