Practical Security Automation and Testing

Network security assessments with Nmap

Network Mapper (Nmap) is an open source network security scanning tool. It's widely used to do host, services, port system security audits, and also the SSL vulnerability. Identifying all the hosts, services, protocols, and communication ports on the network is the first step for network security assessment.

The installation of Nmap will depend on the OS.

The common network security assessment scenario and Nmap commands are listed in the following table:

Common network security assessments scenarios	Nmap command
Fast scan for listening ports	nmap -F --open -Pn
Scan for any missing HTTP security headers such as XSS-Protection	nmap -p80 --script http-security-headers -Pn
DOS attack ...