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 (25 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
13
Brute Force Password Auditing Options
17
References and Additional Reading

Introduction


One of my favorite things about Nmap is how customizable it is. If configured properly, Nmap can be used to scan from single targets to millions of IP addresses in a single run. However, we need to be careful and need to understand the configuration options and scanning phases that can affect performance, but most importantly, really think about our scan objective beforehand. Do we need the information from the reverse DNS lookup? Do we know all targets are online? Is the network congested? Do targets respond fast enough? These and many more aspects can really add up to your scanning time.

Therefore, optimizing scans is important and can save us hours if we are working with many targets. This chapter starts by introducing the different scanning phases, timing, and performance options. Unless we have a solid understanding of what goes on behind the curtains during a scan, we won't be able to completely optimize our scans. Timing templates are designed to work in common scenarios...