Gordon Lyon (known in the Internet by his other name, “Fyodor”) is the man who maintains the leading Nmap Security scan tool. The project started in 1997 as a mere port scanner for Linux and bearing no version number. Due to its popularity and high demand, they started developing the product. The growing rate of users made Nmap to devise a GUI version called "Zenmap", which was originally derived from Umit, a developed between the 2005 and 2006 Nmap Summer of Code, sponsored by Google.
Nmap can perform network inventory, list a service history, identify firewall types and pocket filers, and detect the uptime of the system and the OS. Its huge database may identify the OS fingerprints of the target system easily and reliably.
You can save your Nmap analysis output for later use, or just keep it as a reference. With its port scanning functionality, Nmap can find out which ports are open (both TCP and UDP) in the target systems. Depending on the switch used, you can really do “a brute force method” to actually identify the weaknesses of a system. Once you have done that you can close the unnecessary ports, so that you or your organization do or does not become any hacker’s next victim.
With the extremely flexible Nmap Script Engine (NSE), you can write your own scripts to customize your scanning processes. With the NSE you can really check Vulnerability Exploitations in the target systems, that is really a breakthrough.
Finally, you can find and identify "any device" connected to your network using Nmap - the only requirement is that this device has an IP address belonging to the network.
As a security product, it has received various awards from leading journals and websites.
v6.49 [Jul 30, 2013]
--The ICMP ID of ICMP probes is now matched against the sent ICMP ID, to reduce the chance of false matches.
--[NSE] Made telnet-brute support multiple parallel guessing threads, reuse connections and support password-only logins.
--[NSE] Made the table returned by ssh1.fetch_host_key contain a "key" element, like that of ssh2.fetch_host_key. This fixed a crash in the ssh-hostkey script reported by Dan Farmer and Florian Pelgrim. The "key" element of ssh2.fetch_host_key now is base64-encoded, to match the format used by the known_hosts file.
--[Nsock] Handle timers and timeouts via a priority queue (using a heap) for improved performance. Nsock now only iterates over events which are completed or expired instead of inspecting the entire event set at each iteration.
--[NSE] Update dns-cache-snoop script to use a new list of top 50 domains rather than a 2010 list.
--[NSE] Added the qconn-exec script by Brendan Coles, which tests the QNX QCONN service for remote command execution.
--[Zenmap] Fixed a crash that would happen when you entered a search term starting with a colon: "AttributeError: 'FilteredNetworkInventory' object has no attribute 'match_'".
Reported by Kris Paernell. [David Fifield]
--[Ncat] Added NCAT_PROTO, NCAT_REMOTE_ADDR, NCAT_REMOTE_PORT, NCAT_LOCAL_ADDR and NCAT_LOCAL_PORT environment variables being set in all --*-exec child processes.
A program that lets you easily manage your laptop connections to WiMAX networks
