Matching services with known security vulnerabilities

Version discovery is essential to pen-testers as they can use this information to find public security vulnerabilities affecting a scanned service. The Nmap Scripting Engine allows us to match the popular OSVDB vulnerability database with the discovered services in our scans.

This recipe shows how to list known security vulnerabilities in the osvdb database that could possibly affect a service discovered by using Nmap.

Getting ready

To accomplish this task, we use the NSE script vulscan developed by Marc Ruef. This script is not included in the official Nmap repository, so you need to install it separately before continuing.

To install it, download the latest version of vulscan from http://www.computec.ch/mruef/?s=software&l=e.

After extracting the files, copy the script vulscan.nse in your local script folder ($NMAP_INSTALLATION/scripts/). Then create a folder named vulscan in the same directory and place the osvdb database files object_products...