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

Chapter 4: Reconnaissance Tasks

The most important process during a security assessment is the information gathering phase, as you have probably heard from countless bug bounty hunters these days. In this phase, we discover assets and enumerate the attack surface of our target to learn as much as possible, since every bit of information could help. Normally, in this phase, we gather all the information we can find, including usernames, possible passwords, hostnames, IP addresses, external providers, and internal services, including version banners, among many other interesting bits of data. The information we discover could be invaluable in further stages of our security assessment.

There are thousands of reconnaissance tasks that you can perform during assessments. However, the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) has the advantage of having the internal results obtained from the scans, in addition to external data sources that complement the many standalone tools that help us complete...