For those purists within the auditing and network exploration community, there is good news this week – Nmap version 6.0 has been released to the public. Nmap is the standard for security audits and exploration, and the latest version has some useful improvements.
Version 6 includes improvements to the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE), which includes a bump in script count. Nmap 5 included a script count of 59, where version 6 has grown to 348, and each one has been documented and categorized.
Moreover, Nmap now includes many techniques, including site spidering and brute force, as well as additional support for IPv6.
“Nmap’s developers have 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,” a statement on the new features outlines.
Nmap 6 also marks the introduction of nping, the open source tool for network packet generation, response analysis and response time measurement. Nping can also be used as a raw packet generator for network stack stress testing, ARP poisoning, Denial of Service attacks, route tracing, etc.
Other changes include faster scanning and GUI improvements. It’s available now online, and can be downloaded here.