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

Adjusting performance parameters


Nmap not only adjusts itself to different network and target conditions while scanning, but it also supports several parameters that affect the behavior of Nmap, such as the number of hosts scanned concurrently, number of retries, and number of allowed probes. Learning how to adjust these parameters properly will save you a lot of scanning time in your life.

The following recipe explains the Nmap parameters that can be adjusted to improve performance.

How to do it...

Enter the following command, adjusting the values according to your needs:

# nmap --min-hostgroup 100 --max-hostgroup 500 --max-retries 2 -iR 0

How it works...

The command shown previously tells Nmap to scan and report by grouping no less than 100 (--min-hostgroup 100) and no more than 500 hosts (--max-hostgroup 500). It also tells Nmap to retry only twice before giving up on any port (--max-retries 2).

# nmap --min-hostgroup 100 --max-hostgroup 500 --max-retries 2 -iR 0

It is important to note that...