Slashdot Mirror
Nmap 6 Released Featuring Improved Scripting, Full IPv6 Support
First time accepted submitter Chankey Pathak writes "The Nmap Project is pleased to announce the immediate, free availability of the Nmap Security Scanner version 6.00 from http://nmap.org/. It is the product of almost three years of work, 3,924 code commits, and more than a dozen point releases since the big Nmap 5 release in July 2009. Nmap 6 includes a more powerful Nmap Scripting Engine, 289 new scripts, better web scanning, full IPv6 support, the Nping packet prober, faster scans, and much more!"
It's great to see the use of machine learning for the OS clasification / fingerprinting with IPv6. If this works out well I'd love to see a 3rd-generation IPv4 OS detection added using similar techniques. See http://nmap.org/book/osdetect-guess.html#osdetect-guess-ipv6
Here's a better detail of what's up, even more following the link.
1. NSE Enhanced
The script count has grown from 59 in Nmap 5 to 348 in Nmap 6, and all of them are documented and categorized in our NSE Documentation Portal. The underlying NSE infrastructure has improved dramatically as well.
3. Full IPv6 Support
Basic support isn't enough, so we spent many months ensuring that Nmap version 6 contains full support for IP version 6. And we released it just in time for the World IPv6 Launch.
We've created a new IPv6 OS detection system, advanced host discovery, raw-packet IPv6 port scanning, and many NSE scripts for IPv6-related protocols. It's easy to use too—just specify the -6 argument along with IPv6 target IP addresses or DNS records. In addition, all of our web sites are now accessible via IPv6. For example, Nmap.org can be found at 2600:3c01::f03c:91ff:fe96:967c.
4. New Nping Tool
The newest member of the Nmap suite of networking and security tools is Nping, an open source tool for network packet generation, response analysis and response time measurement. Nping can generate network packets for a wide range of protocols, allowing full control over protocol headers. While Nping can be used as a simple ping utility to detect active hosts, it can also be used as a raw packet generator for network stack stress testing, ARP poisoning, Denial of Service attacks, route tracing, etc. Nping's novel echo mode lets users see how packets change in transit between the source and destination hosts. That's a great way to understand firewall rules, detect packet corruption, and more.
5. Better Zenmap GUI & results viewer
While Nmap started out as a command-line tool and many (possibly most) users still use it that way, we've also developed an enhanced GUI and results viewer named Zenmap. One addition since Nmap 5 is a “filter hosts” feature which allows you to see only the hosts which match your criteria (e.g. Linux boxes, hosts running Apache, etc.) We've also localized the GUI to support five languages besides English. A new script selection interface helps you find and execute Nmap NSE scripts. It even tells you what arguments each script supports.
6. Faster scans
Since Nmap 5 we've rewritten the traceroute system for higher performance and increased the allowed parallelism of the Nmap Scripting Engine and version detection subsystems. We also performed an intense memory audit which reduced peak consumption during our benchmark scan by 90%. We made many improvements to Zenmap data structures and algorithms as well so that it can now handle large enterprise scans with ease.
Shameful plug here guys.
I've compiled the sources earlier this morning into deb packages for those that want to play with it without building from source (building from source will confuse the system and you might not get updates). Both i386 and amd64 versions working on BT5 r2 here. http://www.phillips321.co.uk/2012/05/22/creating-a-debian-package-from-source-checkinstall/
... the question of whether or not Nmap could be used to sniff a network before it is configured with an IP address (DHCP can, so mechanisms to do so must exist, like maybe raw interface access), to do things like silently watch what other traffic is taking place to make smart guess as to which LAN a given interface is physically connected to. This information could then be used to select the IP address it is statically configured to use for a given subnet (but without specific interface information since that can change for many reasons).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Because:
1. Giving credit who submitted a story has been the way Slashdot has worked since last century.
2. Users are free to put whatever web page in as their home page, whether it be a replacement for a finger profile, or Last Measure, or their own blog or whatever.
3. Anonymous Cowards are 99.997% morons.
From the release notes: "Nmap now supports the old-school Gopher protocol thanks to our handy gopher-ls NSE script. We even support Gopher over IPv6!"
If this is the quality of their HTML and CSS code, that doesn't give me much optimism about the quality of their C code.
Why? Just because they didn't spend time making it look pretty for you?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
There's such thing as great coders and also such thing as great developers, but rarely, if ever, the both together.