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

Saving NSE reports in Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a distributed NoSQL database used for handling large amounts of records. For internet-wide scanning, it could be a good idea to store our results in an Elasticsearch instance. Nmap does not support exporting results directly into Elasticsearch; however, we can achieve this task with some help from xmlstarlet.

The following recipe will show you how to generate JSON objects that can be inserted into an Elasticsearch instance.

Getting ready

For this task, we need to use a set of tools named XMLStarlet to work with XML documents. In Debian-based systems, you may install it with the following command:

# apt-get install xmlstarlet

For other systems, visit the XMLStarlet official website for installation instructions at http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/.

How to do it...

  1. Scan your target and save the output in XML mode:
    $nmap -sC -oX scanme.xml scanme.nmap.org
  2. Now run the following xmlstarlet command using as...