The name Nmap stands for Network Mapper. Nmap was designed to be a free utility for network exploration or security auditing.
Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime.
Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics.
It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, but works fine against single hosts. Nmap runs on all major computer operating systems, and both console and graphical versions are available.
Here are some key features of "Nmap":
· Flexible: Supports dozens of advanced techniques for mapping out networks filled with IP filters, firewalls, routers, and other obstacles. This includes many port scanning mechanisms (both TCP & UDP), OS detection, version detection, ping sweeps, and more. See the documentation page
· Powerful: Nmap has been used to scan huge networks of literally hundreds of thousands of machines
· Portable: Most operating systems are supported, including Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, IRIX, Mac OS X, HP-UX, NetBSD, Sun OS, Amiga, and more
· Easy: While Nmap offers a rich set of advanced features for power users, you can start out as simply as "nmap -v -A targethost". Both traditional command line and graphical (GUI) versions are available to suit your preference. Binaries are available for those who do not wish to compile Nmap from source
· Free: The primary goals of the Nmap Project is to help make the Internet a little more secure and to provide administrators/auditors/hackers with an advanced tool for exploring their networks. Nmap is available for free download, and also comes with full source code that you may modify and redistribute under the terms of the license
· Well Documented: Significant effort has been put into comprehensive and up-to-date man pages, whitepapers, and tutorials. Find them in multiple languages here
· Supported: While Nmap comes with no warranty, it is well supported by a vibrant community of developers and users. Most of this interaction occurs on the Nmap mailing lists. Most bug reports and questions should be sent to the nmap-dev list, but only after you read the guidelines. We recommend that all users subscribe to the low-traffic nmap-hackers announcement list
· Acclaimed: Nmap has won numerous awards, including "Information Security Product of the Year" by Linux Journal, Info World and Codetalker Digest. It has been featured in hundreds of magazine articles, several movies, dozens of books, and one comic book series. Visit the press page for further details
· Popular: Thousands of people download Nmap every day, and it is included with many operating systems (Redhat Linux, Debian Linux, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc). It is among the top ten (out of 30,000) programs at the Freshmeat.Net repository. This is important because it lends Nmap its vibrant development and user support communities
Requirements:
· WinPcap 4.x+
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Dramatically improved the version detection database, integrating 2,596 submissions that users contributed since February 3, 2009
· More than a thousand signatures were added, bringing the total to 8,501. Many existing signatures were improved as well. Please keep those submissions and corrections coming! Nmap prints a submission URL and fingerprint when it receives responses it can't yet interpret
· [NSE] Added a new script, oracle-sid-brute, which queries the Oracle TNS-listener for default instance/sid names. The SID enumeration list was prepared by Red Database security.
· [Ncat] The --ssl, --output, and --hex-dump options now work with exec and --sh-exec. Among other things, this allows you to make a program's I/O available over the network wrapped in SSL encryption for security. It is implemented by forking a separate process to handle network communications and relay the data to the sub-process. [Venkat, David]
· Nmap now tries start the WinPcap NPF service on Windows if it is no...
