Vulnerability detection – “ When a new vulnerability is discovered, you often want to scan your networks quickly to identify vulnerable systems before the bad guys do. Neither of these tasks are well suited to traditional Nmap version detection, but both are easily accomplished with NSE…” More sophisticated version detection – “ The Nmap version detection system is able to recognize thousands of different services through its probe and regular expression signature based matching system… Nmap could also recognize more SNMP services if it tried a few hundred different community names by brute force. Network discovery – “ Examples include looking up whois data based on the target domain, querying ARIN, RIPE, or APNIC for the target IP to determine ownership, performing identd lookups on open ports, SNMP queries, and listing available NFS/SMB/RPC shares and services.” Host scripts run only once for every target IP.īefore delving further into usage of NSE scripts, and some examples, we would like to provide a bit more context on what spurred the genesis of NSE and what was the original intention for them. All results are shown next to the port in the Nmap output.

Service scripts pertain to some service (open port) that’s running on our target host. Note that there are two types of scripts that are supported – host and service scripts. They are tagged with the -sC option (default scripts option) or with -script when we want to specify an exact set of scripts. NSE scripts are written in the Lua programming language. NSE was designed to be flexible, specifically for network discovery, more sophisticated version detection, backdoor detection, vulnerability detection and exploitation. Firstly, let’s mention the fact that the set of NSE scripts is quite diverse and constantly growing. Now that we have covered some of the more important features of Nmap, we would like to talk about one of the most, if not the most, important features: NSE, short for Nmap Scripting Engine.

Zenmap nse