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 ACK ping scans

Similar to the TCP SYN ping scan, the TCP ACK ping scan determines whether a host is responding. It can be used to detect hosts blocking SYN packets and ICMP echo requests, but this technique will most likely be blocked by modern firewalls that track connection states because it sends bogus TCP ACK packets associated with non-existing connections.

This recipe shows how to perform a TCP ACK ping scan and its related options.

How to do it...

Open your terminal and enter the following command:

# nmap -sn -PA <target>

The result is a list of hosts that responded to the TCP ACK packets sent and, therefore, are online:

# nmap -sn -PA 192.168.0.1/24
Nmap scan report for 192.168.0.1 Host is up (0.060s latency).
Nmap scan report for 192.168.0.60 Host is up (0.00014s latency).
Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (2 hosts up) scanned in 6.11 seconds

How it works...

The -sn option tells Nmap to skip the port scan phase and only perform...