When we talk of port scanning, the tool that automatically comes to mind is Nmap. Nmap has a good reputation and it is arguably the best open source port scanner available. It has tons of features that allow you to carry out a wide variety of scans over the network to discover what hosts are alive, what ports are open, and also which services and service versions are running on the host. It also has an engine (the Nmap scanning engine) that can scan NSE scripts, that is used to discover common vulnerabilities with the running services. In this chapter, we will make use of Python in order to automate the process of port scanning. This chapter will form the basis for our automated vulnerability scanner, and will supplement the subsequent chapter, which will focus on automating service scanning and enumeration.
This chapter covers the following...
