Nmap the ultimate free port scanner software

For those who are not that familiar with the utility of port scanner software a short description is introduced. A port scanner is an application made up to probe a server or a host for open ports. These ports are often used by two types of people: first the administrators for verifying security policies of their networks and second by attackers in order to identify running services on a host with the agenda to compromise it.

A port scan can be defined best as an attack towards the client which sends requests to a range of server port addresses on a host, with the goal of finding an active port and exploiting a known vulnerability of the service. Therefore, a port scanner softwear does the similar job of an antivirus, but against of port scans.

Now that we cleared that up, I want to introduce you the latest of them- NMap, the ultimate free port scanner software.

Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is a free and open source utility for network discovery and security auditing. It is also commonly used by other systems and network administrator for inventory; monitoring service uptime or host and managing service upgrade schedules. The application runs on all best-known computer operating systems and is also available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X in binary suites.

Nmap, by using raw IP packets does a series of jobs like determining what hosts are available on the network, what services those hosts are offering, what operating systems they are running, what type of packet firewalls are in use. All these scans rapidly done on large networks and also against single hosts.

Additionally, Nmap suite includes an advanced GUI and results viewer (Zenmap), a flexible data transfer, debugging tool (Ncat), a flexible data transfer, a utility for comparing scan results (Ndiff) and a packet generation and response analysis tool (Nping).

Nmap is acclaimed due to the winning of numerous awards, including “Information Security Product of the Year”. Along with this, Nmap is popular, being among the top ten programs at the Freshmeat.net repository which depicts Nmap as vibrant developed. Thousands of people download it everyday, being present in many operating systems.

One disadvantage of it is that the suite doesn’t come with a warranty. Nonetheless, Nmap is well supported by a large community of users, who interact on a mailing list. There they can report and also resolve bugs and problems that may appear.

Maybe the most appealing feature of this product is the lack of charging fee. Nmap Project is created to help make the Internet a more secure place. Furthermore, it provides administrators, hackers and auditors an advanced tool for exploring their networks.

Nmap is also easy, both traditional command line and graphical (GUI) versions are available to suit your preferences; flexible, portable (most operating systems are supported) and powerful (Nmap has been used to scan enormous networks of literally hundreds of thousands of working machines).

And with the risk of repeating me, all these come for free and also comes with full source code that you may modify and redistribute under the terms of the license!

Get involved; make the Internet a safer place!