User Friendly Nmap with Zenmap GUI

Nmap is a very popular and powerful security scanner that can be used to discover hosts and services which has been in development for more than 10 years. It is unlike any simple port scanner where you enter an IP address and it will sweep through 65535 ports to look for any open ports and inform you the common service that is normally running on that open port. Nmap is able to accurately detect the service and version even if the service is running on some obscure port. Another well known feature of Nmap is the ability to tell what operating system is on the machine. It also support scripting allowing users to write (and share) simple scripts (using the Lua programming language, ) to  automate a wide variety of networking tasks. One example is a built-in script that is able to detect whether a host is infected with the Stuxnet worm.The current version of Nmap 5.51 contains a total of 178 scripts.

As good as it sounds,Nmap may not be very user friendly because it is a command line application that requires user to input command line options.If you would like to give Nmap a try,you can use the official graphical user interface frontend and results viewer called Zenmap.Zenmap is already included in the Nmap self-installer and during installation, just make sure that Zenmap (GUI Frontend) is checked.


Using Nmap will be a piece of cake with Zenmap. Just enter the IP address or hostname at the Target box and select a profile followed by clicking the Scan button. There are 10 built-in profiles and selecting any of them will automatically update the command line options so you don’t need to figure them out through the manual. You can customize or just check the scan profiles by clicking the Profile from menubar and select Edit Selected Profile..

Nmap is free and runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and many UNIX platforms. Other than security analyst and hackers uses Nmap, it also has been used in a couple of movies such as Matrix Reloaded, Die Hard 4 (Yippee Ki-Yay!) and a few more.

Download Nmap