What is Nmap? Nmap, short for Network Mapper, is a free, open-source tool for vulnerability scanning and network discovery.
Network administrators use Nmap to identify what devices are running on their systems, discovering hosts that are available and the services they offer, finding open ports and detecting security risks. Nmap can be used to monitor single hosts as well as vast networks that encompass hundreds of thousands of devices and multitudes of subnets.
Though Nmap has evolved over the years and is extremely flexible, at heart it's a port-scan tool, gathering information by sending raw packets to system ports. It listens for responses and determines whether ports are open, closed or filtered in some way by, for example, a.
Other terms used for port scanning include port discovery or enumeration. Nmap.org Since its release in 1997, Nmap has evolved but the basis of its functionality is still port scanning. Nmap port scan The packets that Nmap sends out return with IP addresses and a wealth of other data, allowing you to identify all sorts of network attributes, giving you a profile or map of the network and allowing you to create a hardware and software inventory. Different protocols use different types of packet structures.