Book Image

Nmap 6: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook

Book Image

Nmap 6: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook

Overview of this book

Nmap is a well known security tool used by penetration testers and system administrators. The Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) has added the possibility to perform additional tasks using the collected host information. Tasks like advanced fingerprinting and service discovery, information gathering, and detection of security vulnerabilities."Nmap 6: Network exploration and security auditing cookbook" will help you master Nmap and its scripting engine. You will learn how to use this tool to do a wide variety of practical tasks for pentesting and network monitoring. Finally, after harvesting the power of NSE, you will also learn how to write your own NSE scripts."Nmap 6: Network exploration and security auditing cookbook" is a book full of practical knowledge for every security consultant, administrator or enthusiast looking to master Nmap. The book overviews the most important port scanning and host discovery techniques supported by Nmap. You will learn how to detect mis-configurations in web, mail and database servers and also how to implement your own monitoring system. The book also covers tasks for reporting, scanning numerous hosts, vulnerability detection and exploitation, and its strongest aspect; information gathering.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Nmap 6: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
References
Index

Discovering hosts with ICMP ping scans


Ping scans are used to determine if a host is online and responding. ICMP messages are used for this purpose, and hence ICMP ping scans use these types of packets to accomplish this.

The following recipe describes how to perform an ICMP ping scan with Nmap, and the flags for the different types of ICMP messages.

How to do it...

To make an ICMP echo request, open your terminal and enter the following command:

# nmap -sP -PE scanme.nmap.org

If the host responded, you should see something similar to this:

# nmap -sP -PE scanme.nmap.org 


Nmap scan report for scanme.nmap.org (74.207.244.221) 
Host is up (0.089s latency). 
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 13.25 seconds 

How it works...

The arguments -sP -PE scanme.nmap.org tell Nmap to send an ICMP echo request packet to the host scanme.nmap.org. We can determine that a host is online if we receive an ICMP echo reply to this probe.

SENT (0.0775s) ICMP 192.168.1.102 > 74.207.244.221 Echo request...