Mastering the Nmap Scripting Engine

Chapter 1. Introduction to the Nmap Scripting Engine

The Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) revolutionized the capabilities of Nmap. It was introduced during Google's Summer of Code in 2007, and it has become an arsenal by itself with almost 500 official scripts. Although the first scripts were aimed at improving service and host detection, people quickly started submitting scripts for other tasks. Today, there are 14 categories covering a broad range of tasks, from network discovery to detection and exploitation of security vulnerabilities. You can use NSE scripts to brute-force accounts with weak passwords, find online hosts with different broadcast requests, sniff the network, discover forgotten backup files in web servers, detect the latest SSL 3.0 ...