Book Image

Nmap Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook, Third Edition - Third Edition

By : Paulino Calderon
Book Image

Nmap Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook, Third Edition - Third Edition

By: Paulino Calderon

Overview of this book

Nmap is one of the most powerful tools for network discovery and security auditing used by millions of IT professionals, from system administrators to cybersecurity specialists. This third edition of the Nmap: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook introduces Nmap and its family - Ncat, Ncrack, Ndiff, Zenmap, and the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) - and guides you through numerous tasks that are relevant to security engineers in today’s technology ecosystems. The book discusses some of the most common and useful tasks for scanning hosts, networks, applications, mainframes, Unix and Windows environments, and ICS/SCADA systems. Advanced Nmap users can benefit from this book by exploring the hidden functionalities within Nmap and its scripts as well as advanced workflows and configurations to fine-tune their scans. Seasoned users will find new applications and third-party tools that can help them manage scans and even start developing their own NSE scripts. Practical examples featured in a cookbook format make this book perfect for quickly remembering Nmap options, scripts and arguments, and more. By the end of this Nmap book, you will be able to successfully scan numerous hosts, exploit vulnerable areas, and gather valuable information.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Appendix A: HTTP, HTTP Pipelining, and Web Crawling Configuration Options
Appendix Β: Brute-Force Password Auditing Options
Appendix F: References and Additional Reading

Collecting signatures of web servers

Nmap is an amazing tool for information gathering, and the variety of tasks that can be done with NSE is simply remarkable. The popular service ShodanHQ (https://www.shodan.io/) offers a database with a nice GUI of HTTP banners, which is useful for analyzing the impact of vulnerabilities. Its users can find out the number of devices that are online by country, which are identified by their service banners and IP geolocation. ShodanHQ uses its own built-in house tools to gather its data, but Nmap can easily be used for this task and take advantage of NSE.

In this recipe, we will see how to scan indefinitely for web servers and collect their HTTP headers with Nmap.

How to do it...

Open your terminal and enter the following command:

$ nmap -p80,443 -Pn -T4 --open --script http-headers,http-title,ssl-cert --script-args http.useragent="A friendly web crawler (http://calderonpale.com)",http-headers.useget -oX random-webservers.xml...