Nmap (Network Mapper) is a powerful open-source tool used for network discovery and security auditing. It’s widely used by penetration testers and security professionals to identify hosts and services on a network, as well as to detect security vulnerabilities.

NOTE: We didn’t include installation instructions on the previous section as this is already available on the Kali VM.

Basic Nmap Commands and Common Options

Basic Scan

nmap <target>
Example: nmap 192.168.1.1

Common Options and Tags

-sP / -sn (Ping Scan): Discover live hosts without scanning ports.

nmap -sn <target>
Example: nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24

We will begin with an nmap service scan against the target:
nmap -sVC 192.168.100.12

This is a standard scan that will give us the following output:

It scans the top 1000 ports and gives us details on the services running on these ports.