Although being able to conduct port scans is an integral part of using the Nmap suite of tools, the developers of Nmap created a very powerful engine that's built into the tool: the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE). This chapter introduces the NSE, and covers all the topics needed to use reliably-written scripts in the Nmap script repository, in order to conduct reconnaissance scans that include much more than just what ports are open and which services are listening.

In this chapter, we will cover: