Nmap: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook, is a practical book that covers some of the most useful tasks you can do with Nmap. The book is divided into tasks or recipes. Each recipe focuses on a single task explained with command-line examples, sample output, and even additional personal tips that I know you will find handy.
Nmap's vast functionality is explored through 11 chapters covering more than 120 different tasks for penetration testers and system administrators. Unlike Nmap's official book, this cookbook focuses on the tasks you can do with the Nmap Scripting Engine and unofficial related tools, covering the core functionality of Nmap, but without focusing on the scanning techniques that are perfectly described in the official book. Think of this book as an addition to what the official Nmap book covers.
There were many great NSE scripts I wish I had more space to include in this book and many more that will be created after its publication. I invite you to follow the development mailing list and stay up to date with Nmap's latest features and NSE scripts.
I hope that you not only enjoy reading this cookbook, but as you master the Nmap Scripting Engine, you come up with new ideas to contribute to this amazing project.
Chapter 1, Nmap Fundamentals, covers the most common tasks performed with Nmap. In addition, it introduces Rainmap Lite, Ndiff, Nping, Ncrack, Ncat, and Zenmap.
Chapter 2, Network Exploration, covers host discovery techniques supported by Nmap and other useful tricks with the Nmap Scripting Engine.
Chapter 3, Reconnaissance Tasks, covers interesting information-gathering tasks with Nmap and the Nmap Scripting Engine.
Chapter 4, Scanning Web Servers, covers tasks related to web servers and web application security auditing.
Chapter 5, Scanning Databases, covers security auditing tasks for MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, and NoSQL databases.
Chapter 6, Scanning Mail Servers, covers different tasks for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP servers.
Chapter 7, Scanning Windows Systems, covers tasks for security auditing Microsoft Windows systems.
Chapter 8, Scanning ICS SCADA Systems, covers tasks for scanning and identifying Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.
Chapter 9, Optimizing Scans, covers tasks from scan optimization to the distribution of scans among several clients.
Chapter 10, Generating Scan Reports, covers the output options supported by Nmap and some additional nonofficial tools to generate reports in formats that are not supported.
Chapter 11, Writing Your Own NSE Scripts, covers the fundamentals of NSE development. It includes specific examples to handle sockets, output, NSE libraries, and parallelism.
Appendix A, HTTP, HTTP Pipelining, and Web Crawling Configuration Options, covers the configuration options of libraries related to the protocol HTTP.
Appendix B, Brute Force Password Auditing Options, covers configuration options of the NSE brute force engine.
Appendix C, NSE Debugging, covers the debugging options for the Nmap Scripting Engine.
Appendix D, Additional Output Options, covers additional output options supported by Nmap.
Appendix E, Introduction to Lua, covers the basics of Lua programming.
Appendix F, References and Additional Reading, covers references, additional reading, and official documentation used throughout this book.
You will need the latest version of Nmap (https://nmap.org/) to follow the recipes in this book. Installation instructions for unofficial tools can be found in the book.
This book is for any security consultant, administrator, or enthusiast looking to learn how to use and master Nmap and the Nmap Scripting Engine.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it..., How it works..., There's more..., and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows.
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "If you keep a working copy of the svn repository, you may do this easily by executing the following commands inside that directory."
A block of code is set as follows:
if http.page_exists(data, req_404, page_404, uri, true) then
stdnse.print_debug(1, "Page exists! → %s", uri)
endAny command-line input or output is written as follows:
$svn co --username guest https://svn.nmap.org/nmapNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You should see the message NMAP SUCCESFULLY INSTALLEDwhen the operation is complete."
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