Chapter 6: Scanning Databases

Applications must store different types of information. There could be millions of records that need to be stored somewhere and they must be stored securely. Database services are crucial because they provide a convenient way of managing information, and programming APIs are available for almost any language and database type.

The Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) has added support for numerous database services during the past few years. System administrators can automate several tasks when dealing with numerous database servers, such as running a query to inform us about the application status. On the other hand, securing a database server must be done carefully and is critical as information is stored there. Nmap also helps us with the different scripts available to automate common security auditing tasks, such as checking for empty root passwords or detecting insecure configurations.

This chapter covers different NSE scripts for the most common relational...