Preface

Nmap 6: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook is a 100 percent practical book that follows a cookbook's style. Each recipe focuses on a single task and contains command line examples, sample output, a detailed explanation, and additional tips that could come in handy.

Nmap's vast functionality is explored through nine chapters covering 100 different tasks for penetration testers and system administrators. Unlike Nmap's official book, this cookbook focuses on tasks that you can do with the Nmap Scripting Engine, without forgetting to cover the core functionality of Nmap.

There were many great NSE scripts I wish I had more space to include in this book and many more that will be created after its publication. Luis Martin Garcia recently posted an interesting video that shows how much Nmap has grown over the years at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rlF1MSAbXk. I invite you to register for the development mailing list and stay up-to-date with Nmap's latest features and NSE scripts.

I hope that you not only enjoy reading this cookbook, but also that, as you master the Nmap Scripting Engine, you come up with new ideas to create and contribute to this amazing project.

Finally, don't forget that you can send me your questions and I'll do my best to help you out.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Nmap Fundamentals, covers the most common tasks performed with Nmap. Additionally, it briefly introduces Ndiff, Nping, and Zenmap.

Chapter 2, Network Exploration, covers host discovery techniques supported by Nmap, and other useful tricks with the Nmap Scripting Engine.

Chapter 3, Gathering Additional Host Information covers interesting information gathering tasks with Nmap and its scripting engine.

Chapter 4, Auditing Web Servers, covers tasks related to web security auditing.

Chapter 5, Auditing Databases, covers security auditing tasks for MongoDB, MySQL, MS SQL, and CouchDB databases.

Chapter 6, Auditing Mail Servers, covers tasks for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP servers.

Chapter 7, Scanning Large Networks, covers tasks that are useful when scanning large networks ranging from scan optimization to distributing scans among several clients.

Chapter 8, Generating Scan Reports, covers the output options supported by Nmap.

Chapter 9, Writing Your Own NSE Scripts, covers the fundamentals of NSE development. It includes specific examples for handling sockets, output, libraries, and parallelism.

Appendix, References, covers references and official documentation used throughout this book.

What you need for this book

You will need the latest version of Nmap (available from http://nmap.org) to follow the recipes in this book.

Who this book is for

This book is for any security consultant, administrator, or enthusiast looking to learn how to use and master Nmap and the Nmap Scripting Engine.

Note

This book contains instructions on how to carry out various penetration tests such as brute force password audits on remote networks and devices. These tasks are likely to be illegal in your jurisdiction in many circumstances, or at least count as a terms of service violation or professional misconduct. The instructions are provided so that you can test your system against threats, understand the nature of those threats, and protect your own systems from similar attacks. Before following them make sure you are on the correct side of the legal and ethical line... use your powers for good!

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The flag -PS forces a TCP SYN ping scan."

A block of code is set as follows:

table.insert(fingerprints, {
  category='cms',
  probes={
    {path='/changelog.txt'},
    {path='/tinymce/changelog.txt'},
  },
  matches={
    {match='Version (.-) ', output='Version \\1'},
    {output='Interesting, a changelog.'}
  }
})

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ nmap -sP -PS80,21,53 <target>
$ nmap -sP -PS1-1000 <target>
$ nmap -sP -PS80,100-1000 <target>

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on OK to start downloading your new working copy."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Questions

You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.