Book Image

Nmap: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Paulino Calderon
Book Image

Nmap: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Paulino Calderon

Overview of this book

This is the second edition of ‘Nmap 6: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook’. A book aimed for anyone who wants to master Nmap and its scripting engine through practical tasks for system administrators and penetration testers. Besides introducing the most powerful features of Nmap and related tools, common security auditing tasks for local and remote networks, web applications, databases, mail servers, Microsoft Windows machines and even ICS SCADA systems are explained step by step with exact commands and argument explanations. The book starts with the basic usage of Nmap and related tools like Ncat, Ncrack, Ndiff and Zenmap. The Nmap Scripting Engine is thoroughly covered through security checks used commonly in real-life scenarios applied for different types of systems. New chapters for Microsoft Windows and ICS SCADA systems were added and every recipe was revised. This edition reflects the latest updates and hottest additions to the Nmap project to date. The book will also introduce you to Lua programming and NSE script development allowing you to extend further the power of Nmap.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
13
Brute Force Password Auditing Options
17
References and Additional Reading

Abusing mod_userdir to enumerate user accounts


Apache's module userdir provides access to user directories using URIs with the syntax /~username/. With Nmap, we can perform dictionary attacks and determine a list of valid usernames on the system remotely.

This recipe shows you how to make Nmap perform brute force attacks to enumerate user accounts in Apache web servers, with mod_userdir enabled.

How to do it...

To attempt to enumerate valid users in a web server with mod_userdir, use the following command:

$ nmap -p80 --script http-userdir-enum <target>

All the users found will be included in the results:

   PORT   STATE SERVICE 
   80/tcp open  http 
   |_http-userdir-enum: Potential Users: root, web, test 

How it works...

The Nmap options -p80 --script http-userdir-enum launch the NSE script http-userdir-enum if a web server is found on port 80 (-p80). Apache web servers with mod_userdir allow access to user directories using URIs such as http://domain.com/~root/, and this script helps us...