Book Image

Nmap 6: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook

Book Image

Nmap 6: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook

Overview of this book

Nmap is a well known security tool used by penetration testers and system administrators. The Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) has added the possibility to perform additional tasks using the collected host information. Tasks like advanced fingerprinting and service discovery, information gathering, and detection of security vulnerabilities."Nmap 6: Network exploration and security auditing cookbook" will help you master Nmap and its scripting engine. You will learn how to use this tool to do a wide variety of practical tasks for pentesting and network monitoring. Finally, after harvesting the power of NSE, you will also learn how to write your own NSE scripts."Nmap 6: Network exploration and security auditing cookbook" is a book full of practical knowledge for every security consultant, administrator or enthusiast looking to master Nmap. The book overviews the most important port scanning and host discovery techniques supported by Nmap. You will learn how to detect mis-configurations in web, mail and database servers and also how to implement your own monitoring system. The book also covers tasks for reporting, scanning numerous hosts, vulnerability detection and exploitation, and its strongest aspect; information gathering.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Nmap 6: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
References
Index

Fingerprinting the operating system of a host


Determining the operating system of a host is essential to every penetration tester for many reasons including listing possible security vulnerabilities, determining the available system calls to set the specific exploit payloads, and for many other OS-dependent tasks. Nmap is known for having the most comprehensive OS fingerprint database and functionality.

This recipe shows how to fingerprint the operating system of a remote host by using Nmap.

How to do it...

Open a terminal and enter the following:

#nmap -O <target>

The output will look similar to the following:

# nmap -O scanme.nmap.org
Nmap scan report for scanme.nmap.org (74.207.244.221)
Host is up (0.12s latency).
Not shown: 995 closed ports
PORT     STATE    SERVICE
22/tcp   open     ssh
25/tcp   filtered smtp
80/tcp   open     http
646/tcp  filtered ldp
9929/tcp open     nping-echo
Device type: general purpose
Running (JUST GUESSING): Linux 2.6.X (87%)
OS CPE: cpe:/o:linux:kernel...