Meaza Asfaw

NWIT 173

Submitted to: Professor Matthew Early

Date:7/12/2020

Nmap is a free, open source network vulnerability scanning tool. I downloaded Nmap 7.8 from

the official website and perform the command scname.nmap.org from the command line

interface. The result of this scan is shown in the image below

This quick scan reveals basic information about a network such as IP address of the target,

reverse DNS lookup, open ports on the device. This information is crucial to learn about the

network.

A cyber security professional uses Nmap to scan for the existence of open ports on a system. In big corporate

network, there are thousands of computers that run many services and applications. A cyber

security professional would need to look for vulnerabilities in this complex network and harden

the systems before the hackers exploit the vulnerabilities. Nmap helps the security expert by

checking for hosts and services on a network. It scans the network and discover many

information about the network such as what's connected, services running on each host, perform

TCP and UDP scanning, reverse DNS lookup and so on. It also performs OS fingerprinting.

Once obtaining the information the security expert identifies the weak point of the network and

how it could be exploited by attackers. The expert can harden the network by minimizing the

attack surfaces and reduce the possibility of potential data breach on the network.

Nmap is used by both network security professionals and hackers. Network professionals (it can

be internal IT team or a penetration testing company) use Nmap to scan the network and gain

understanding about the network so that they can take the necessary precautionary measures to

defend the network from hackers. Hackers on the other hand use Nmap to hack the network and

steal information and/or perform denial of service attack on organizations. How hackers use the

information depends on their motive.