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

Adjusting scan groups

Nmap uses scan groups when processing multiple targets in parallel. This is important as new scan groups will not start until all hosts in the current scan group are finished. If we are performing tasks that are slow or time-consuming, or a host is stuck at the execution of some script, we won't see any results from other hosts in the current group, or others, until the hosts in the current scan group are processed. Reducing the size of a scan group is a good option if you are planning on using Nmap's resume function or if you wish to see results in smaller batches, at the expense of less parallelism in your scans.

The following recipe describes how to adjust the size of the scan groups in Nmap.

How to do it...

Use the --max-hostgroup Nmap argument to set the maximum size for the scan groups. A low number will process results to the screen faster at the expense of less parallelism during the scan:

# nmap -iL list.txt --max-hostgroup 5
...