Nmap is free and is one of the most powerful network scanning tools available for both Windows and Linux platforms. Nmap can help both network administrators and cybersecurity professionals in many ways.
Nmap features include the following:
- Creating a network inventory
- Checking for live hosts
- Determining operating systems
- Determining running services and their version
- Identifying vulnerabilities on a host
- Detecting sniffers
- Determining whether a firewall is present on a network
We will go over, to begin with, the basics of Nmap and move gradually on to advanced scanning techniques. As penetration testers, we must ensure that we have an arsenal of tools that will help us to perform our jobs efficiently. However, as professionals, we must also ensure that we are very familiar with, and know how to use, each tool available to us.
So, we are going to start by performing a basic...
