Introduction to NMAP

Coming from the automation controls space, I used NMAP early on in my career to troubleshoot new technology that was starting to adopt TCP-based protocols. Finding hardware that had open ports that had zero documentation was commonplace in the mid-00s. Over the next two decades, I followed this project and watched it grow into the foundational tool it is today. Not only is it used for finding open ports, but it can also be used to perform operating system fingerprinting, application identification, and many more features.

In this section, we are going to install and run NMAP against our lab environment. We will identify open ports and the services running on these ports. Scanning the network for assets and open ports is fundamental for gaining a foothold and a pivot point inside the industrial network when in the field working on a client's network. As said in the previous chapter about Wireshark being the number one tool for a pentester, I would say NMAP...