Chapter 1, Nmap Fundamentals, covers the most common tasks performed with Nmap. Additionally, it briefly introduces Ndiff, Nping, and Zenmap.

Chapter 2, Network Exploration, covers host discovery techniques supported by Nmap, and other useful tricks with the Nmap Scripting Engine.

Chapter 3, Gathering Additional Host Information covers interesting information gathering tasks with Nmap and its scripting engine.

Chapter 4, Auditing Web Servers, covers tasks related to web security auditing.

Chapter 5, Auditing Databases, covers security auditing tasks for MongoDB, MySQL, MS SQL, and CouchDB databases.

Chapter 6, Auditing Mail Servers, covers tasks for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP servers.

Chapter 7, Scanning Large Networks, covers tasks that are useful when scanning large networks ranging from scan optimization to distributing scans among several clients.

Chapter 8, Generating Scan Reports, covers the output options supported by Nmap.

Chapter 9, Writing Your Own NSE Scripts, covers the fundamentals of NSE development. It includes specific examples for handling sockets, output, libraries, and parallelism.

Appendix, References, covers references and official documentation used throughout this book.

You will need the latest version of Nmap (available from http://nmap.org) to follow the recipes in this book.

This book is for any security consultant, administrator, or enthusiast looking to learn how to use and master Nmap and the Nmap Scripting Engine.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The flag -PS forces a TCP SYN ping scan."

A block of code is set as follows:

table.insert(fingerprints, {
  category='cms',
  probes={
    {path='/changelog.txt'},
    {path='/tinymce/changelog.txt'},
  },
  matches={
    {match='Version (.-) ', output='Version \\1'},
    {output='Interesting, a changelog.'}
  }
})

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ nmap -sP -PS80,21,53 <target>
$ nmap -sP -PS1-1000 <target>
$ nmap -sP -PS80,100-1000 <target>

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on OK to start downloading your new working copy."

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