The Nmap developers recently announced the release of the new version 7.92 and is that the launch of Nmap 7.92 was scheduled to coincide with the DEFCON 2021 conference (it took place from August 5 to 8). This new version comes with various updates and especially with new scripts, code improvements and more.
For those unfamiliar with Nmap, you should know that this is an open source utility that is used to perform port scanning. It was originally created for Linux although it is currently cross-platform. It is used to evaluate the security of computer systemsAs well as to discover services or servers on a computer network, for this Nmap sends defined packets to other computers and analyzes their responses.
Hi friends. Many of us are unable to attend Defcon in person this year due to a pandemic, but we won't let that stop our traditional Defcon Nmap launch! We just released Nmap 7.92 and it includes dozens of performance enhancements, feature enhancements, and bug fixes that we've made over the last 10 months.
Main new features of Nmap 7.92
In this new version that is presented of Nmap 7.92 Npcap library capabilities have been improved to capture and replace packets in Windows. The library is being developed as a replacement for WinPcap, is built using the modern Windows NDIS 6 LWF API, and demonstrates better performance, security, and reliability.
With the Npcap update, Nmap 7.92 offers support for Windows 10 on ARM-based systems, including Microsoft Surface Pro X and Samsung Galaxy Book G. Support for the WinPcap library has been discontinued, plus Windows builds have been translated to use Visual Studio 2019, Windows 10 SDK, and UCRT. Removed support for Windows Vista and earlier versions.
Another change that stands out in the new version is that it se improved the accuracy of UDP test requests (UDP payload, protocol specific requests that respond instead of ignoring a UDP packet) as new checks added: TS3INIT1 for UDP port 3389 and DTLS for UDP 3391.
Besides that the code was modified to parse the dialects of the SMB2 protocol and the speed of the smb-protocol script was improved. The versions of the SMB protocol are aligned with Microsoft documentation (3.0.2 instead of 3.02).
On the other hand it is mentioned that in Nmap 7.92 most of the NSE scripts have added support for TLS 1.3. To use advanced features such as SSL tunneling and certificate scanning, at least OpenSSL 1.1.1 is required.
Of the other changes that stand out from the new version:
- Added "–unique" option to avoid scanning the same IP addresses multiple times when different domain names resolve to the same IP.
- 3 new NSE scripts have been included to automate various actions with Nmap:
nbns-interfaces for information on the IP addresses of the network interfaces by contacting NBNS (NetBIOS Name Service).
openflow-info for information on the supported OpenFlow protocols.
port states to list the network ports for each stage of the verification, including the results for "Not shown: X ports closed." - New signatures were added to detect network applications and operating systems.
Finally if you want to know more about it about this new version, you can check the details in the following link.
How to install Nmap 7.92 on Linux?
For those who are interested in being able to install Nmap along with its other tools on their system, They can do it by following the steps we share below.
Though we can resort to compiling the source code of the application in our system. The code can be downloaded and compiled by executing the following:
wget https://nmap.org/dist/nmap-7.92.tar.bz2 bzip2 -cd nmap-7.92.tar.bz2 | tar xvf - cd nmap-7.92 ./configure make su root make install
In the case of distributions with support for RPM packages, they can install the Nmap 7.90 package by opening a terminal and executing the following commands:
rpm -vhU https://nmap.org/dist/nmap-7.92-1.x86_64.rpm rpm -vhU https://nmap.org/dist/zenmap-7.92-1.noarch.rpm rpm -vhU https://nmap.org/dist/ncat-7.92-1.x86_64.rpm rpm -vhU https://nmap.org/dist/nping-0.7.92-1.x86_64.rpm