[rps-include post=6632]

Nmap is very popular tool among network and system administrators and pen-testers. As a pentester I generally start a penetration test with nmap. Nmap simply uses network protocols to scan given network range with given options. We will look all of the common options in next tutorials.

Info

Nmap is shorthand of the network mapper. Nmap project started by Fyodor. And gain momentum from its start. Nmap is number one tool for network scanning. Beside network scanning it have different capabilities. Here are important of them

Port scanning
Scripting capabilities
Version detection
Service detection
Operating System detection
Snmp Brute Force
…

Installation

As a popular security tool a lot of Linux distribution includes it as package. Which means it can be downloaded from distro specific package manager. Here are some of them

Fedora/RedHat/Centos

$ yum install nmap -y

Kali/Ubuntu/Debian

$ apt-get install nmap -y

Suse

$ yast install nmap -y

Windows

Windows have prebuild binaries and can be downloaded from here

Install From Source

Nmap can be installed from source. But this is a bit complicated process so we skip this step.