nmap Command Examples

Network exploration tool and security/port scanner. Some features (e.g. SYN scan) activate only when nmap is run with root privileges. More information: https://nmap.org/book/man.html.

• Scan the top 1000 ports of a remote host with various [v]erbosity levels:

nmap -v{{1|2|3}} {{ip_or_hostname}}

• Run a ping sweep over an entire subnet or individual hosts very aggressively:

nmap -T5 -sn {{192.168.0.0/24|ip_or_hostname1,ip_or_hostname2,...}}

• Enable OS detection, version detection, script scanning, and traceroute of hosts from a file:

sudo nmap -A -iL {{path/to/file.txt}}

• Scan a specific list of ports (use -p- for all ports from 1 to 65535):

nmap -p {{port1,port2,...}} {{ip_or_host1,ip_or_host2,...}}

• Perform service and version detection of the top 1000 ports using default NSE scripts, writing results (-oA) to output files:

nmap -sC -sV -oA {{top-1000-ports}} {{ip_or_host1,ip_or_host2,...}}

• Scan target(s) carefully using default and safe NSE scripts:

nmap --script "default and safe" {{ip_or_host1,ip_or_host2,...}}

• Scan for web servers running on standard ports 80 and 443 using all available http-* NSE scripts:

nmap --script "http-*" {{ip_or_host1,ip_or_host2,...}} -p 80,443

• Attempt evading IDS/IPS detection by using an extremely slow scan (-T0), decoy source addresses (-D), [f]ragmented packets, random data and other methods:

sudo nmap -T0 -D {{decoy_ip1,decoy_ip2,...}} --source-port {{53}} -f --data-length {{16}} -Pn {{ip_or_host}}