Nmap. What is it? How do I use it?

So What is Nmap?

NMAP a very popular tool used for Network and Service enumeration, it’s used to discover what devices are on a network and enumerate the public facing services that located on each host.

Well, that’s cool but how do I use it?

(Make you have nmap installed apt install nmap) Well, to use Nmap for network discovery one of the easiest ways is to scan a subnet we can do this by running the following command nmap 192.168.2.0/24 We specify /24 as that’s the subnet its running on, 192.168.2.0 to 192.168.2.255 is the range it will scan. This will also run basic service enumeration.

If we already know our targets ip we can just run nmap (IP) this will perform basic service enumeration on the target.

Seems Neat, What more can we do with this?

Well, beyond just telling us that x, y, z ports are open it can tell us what’s on the ports(amazing, right?). for example we can use -O for OS detection, -sV for service version and info enumeration and many many more. I Personally use -sV -sC for my scans. If we want to scan UDP ports we can use the -sU option.

Hope this helped :)