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

Writing brute-force password auditing scripts

Brute-force password auditing has become a major strength of NSE. The brute library allows developers to quickly write scripts to perform custom brute-force attacks. Nmap offers libraries such as unpwd, which gives access to a flexible username and password database to further customize the attacks, and the creds library, which provides an interface to manage the valid credentials found.

This recipe will guide you through the process of writing your brute-force script with the NSE brute, unpwdb, and creds libraries to perform brute-force password auditing against web applications.

How to do it...

Let's write an NSE script to brute-force WordPress accounts:

  1. Create the http-wordpress-brute.nse file and fill in the required information tags:
    description = [[
    performs brute force password auditing against Wordpress CMS/blog installations.
    This script uses the unpwdb and brute libraries to perform password guessing. Any...