Scan reports are useful to both penetration testers and system administrators. Penetration testers need to report their findings, whereas system administrators keep a network inventory to monitor their IT assets. However, a common mistake made by both is not to use the reporting capabilities within Nmap to speed up the generation of these reports.
Nmap can write the scan results in several formats, and it is up to the user whether to generate an HTML report, read it from a scripting language, or import it into a third-party security tool to continue testing other aspects of the targets. In this chapter, we will cover different tasks related to storing and processing scan reports. We start by introducing the different file formats supported by Nmap. Then, we move on to tips, such as using Zenmap to generate a network topology graph, reporting vulnerability checks, and generating reports in formats not...
