What is Nmap? Why you need this network mapper


Network administrators, IT managers and security professionals face a never-ending battle, constantly checking on what exactly is running on their networks and the vulnerabilities that lurk within. While there is a wealth of monitoring utilities available for network mapping and security auditing, nothing beats Nmap’s combination of versatility and usability, making it the widely acknowledged de facto standard.

What is Nmap?

Nmap, short for Network Mapper, is a free, open-source tool for vulnerability scanning and network discovery. Network administrators use Nmap to identify what devices are running on their systems, discovering hosts that are available and the services they offer, finding open ports and detecting security risks.

Nmap can be used to monitor single hosts as well as vast networks that encompass hundreds of thousands of devices and multitudes of subnets.

Though Nmap has evolved over the years and is extremely flexible, at heart it’s a port-scan tool, gathering information by sending raw packets to system ports. It listens for responses and determines whether ports are open, closed or filtered in some way by, for example, a firewall. Other terms used for port scanning include port discovery or enumeration.

nmap portscanNmap.org

Since its release in 1997, Nmap has evolved but the basis of its functionality is still port scanning.

Port scanning

The packets that Nmap sends out return with IP addresses and a wealth of other data, allowing you to identify all sorts of network attributes, giving you a profile or map of the network and allowing you to create a hardware and software inventory.

Different protocols use different types of packet structures. Nmap employs transport layer protocols including TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), UDP (User Datagram Protocol), and SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol), as well as supporting protocols like ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol), used to send error messages.



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