Nmap is one of the most important projects in the world of cybersecurity, this TCP and UDP port scanner has become a Swiss army knife of pentesting around the world. When a security researcher wants to check out a target’s defenses, they’ll always start by performing an advanced port scan to see what ports are open, what operating system they’re using, and even what version of a certain service is. Nmap has been 25 years since the first version was released, and now we have a new version with major improvements.
What is Nmap and what is it for?
Nmap is currently the best program to perform a host scan within a local network, although it also allows us to check if a specific host with an IPv4 or IPv6 is up and running. Other very important features of this program is that it allows us to perform a scan of all the ports to a certain target, and it will do it as fast as it can but without raising “suspicion” on the target computer, since they could block our attempts with the firewall .
In addition to being able to scan hosts and ports of a certain host, it is also capable of knowing the operating system that the destination is using , and we even have the possibility of knowing what version of a certain software such as SSH, FTP or web the device is using. destination, very valuable information with the aim of trying to carry out a good pentesting. Finally, this program also allows us to run advanced scripts thanks to Nmap-NSE in order to automate different types of attacks, such as testing hundreds of users and passwords.
News of the new version Nmap 7.93
In this new version we have the latest version of Npcap 1.71 for Windows operating systems, this data capture library through the network card replaces the popular WinPcap that we had before. The new library provides us with greater security, reliability but above all, better Nmap performance and bug fixes that have been detected over several months.
Another important change is for users of Linux operating systems, in this case, a bug prevented Nmap from discovering Linux interfaces when it did not have an IPv4 address configured, now this bug has been fixed. Something similar happened in FreeBSD , if you use this operating system or one based on it, there was a problem when it came to getting the correct paths from the system to go to the Internet. If you are using NSE , you should know that exception handling has now been improved so that it does not return stack debug messages, nor does it indicate that there was an error because the script execution failed.
Finally, the latest version of Ncat incorporated in Nmap has support for SOCKS5 proxies, which will return the configured IP address as the host name, instead of an IPv4 or IPv6 address.
As you can see, this new version of Nmap is a maintenance version with very important bug fixes, and also adding some interesting features, as well as updating all the software related to the tool.
