Vulnerability discovery with Nmap

As you learned in the previous chapter, Nmap is one of the most popular network scanners that’s commonly used in the networking and cybersecurity industries to discover host systems, identify open ports, detect service versions, and profile the operating system of a target. Furthermore, there’s the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE), which is integrated within Nmap and provides advanced scanning capabilities using custom Nmap scripts to detect common security vulnerabilities on targeted systems. However, the Nmap scripts that are used by the NSE component can be aggressive and have the potential to crash a system and cause data loss. Therefore, it’s important to consider the potential risk and impact of using NSE during your security assessments as an ethical hacker.

There are a lot of pre-built scripts for NSE that are already pre-installed on Kali Linux. The following are the various categories of NSE scripts:

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