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

Discovering hosts with TCP SYN ping scans

Ping scans are used for detecting live hosts in networks. Nmap's default host discovery process sends TCP SYN, TCP ACK, and ICMP packets to determine whether a host is responding, but if a firewall is blocking these requests, it will be treated as offline. Fortunately, Nmap supports a scanning technique named the TCP SYN ping scan, which is very handy for probing different ports in an attempt to determine whether a host is online or at least has more permissive filtering rules.

This recipe will talk about the TCP SYN ping scan and its related options.

How to do it...

Open your terminal and enter the following command:

# nmap -sn -PS <target>

You should see a list of hosts found in the target range using TCP SYN ping scanning:

# nmap -sn -PS 192.1.1/24
Nmap scan report for 192.168.0.1 
Host is up (0.060s latency). 
Nmap scan report for 192.168.0.2 
Host is up (0.0059s latency). 
Nmap scan report for 192.168.0.3...