There are several popular tools that are used by security professionals to perform security assessment and vulnerability testing. As these tools can generate the same types of scans, fingerprinting, and other exploitive activities, as might be used by hackers and malicious agents, they can be useful to a packet analyst to analyze the packets that they generate with Wireshark to build familiarity with how different types of activities appear in a packet trace and also to build display filters to detect them.

One of the most popular tools is Network Mapper (Nmap), a free and open source utility for network discovery and security auditing. Nmap runs on all major computer operating systems and offers a command-line and GUI version (Zenmap).