The project celebrates its 25th anniversary and heads towards the 8.0 branch
The launch of the new version of the network security scanner Nmap 7.93, designed to perform a network audit and identify active network services. This new release was timed to be released on the project's 25th anniversary day. It should be noted that over the years the project has evolved from a conceptual port scanner, published in 1997 in Phrack magazine, to a full-fledged application for analyzing network security and determining the server applications used.
The release primarily includes fixes and improvements intended to improve stability and resolve known issues before work begins on a major new branch of Nmap 8.
Twenty-five years ago today, I released the first version of Nmap in a
Phrack's article called The Art of Port Scanning (https://nmap.org/p51-11.html).
I never thought I'd still be at it a quarter of a century later, but that's
because I also did not anticipate such a wonderful community of users and
collaborators spanning those decades. You have helped Nmap flourish from a
pretty simple port scanner to a fully featured network discoverer app
Trusted by millions of users every day. So thanks for that.And we're not done yet!
Main new features of Nmap 7.93
In this new version of Nmap 7.93 I would release it npcap, used for packet capture and replacement on the Windows platform, has been updated to version 1.71. The library is developed by the Nmap project as a replacement for WinPcap, built using the modern Windows NDIS 6 LWF API, and demonstrates increased performance, security, and reliability.
En NSE (Nmap Scripting Engine), which allows you to run scripts to automate various actions with Nmap, improved exception and event handling, as well as the return of unused pcap sockets was adjusted.
In addition to this, it is also noted that capabilities have been improved of NSE scripts dhcp-discover/broadcast-dhcp-discover (allowed to set client ID), oracle-tns-version (added detection of Oracle 19c+ versions), redis-info (fixed issues with displaying inaccurate information about connections and cluster nodes ).
Another novelty that stands out is that in Ncat has added support for SOCKS5 proxies which return the binding address as a host name instead of an IPv4/IPv6 address.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Updated signature databases to identify network applications and operating systems.
- A build with OpenSSL 3.0 was provided, with no deprecated function calls in the new branch.
Updated libraries libssh2 1.10.0, zlib 1.2.12, Lua 5.3.6, libpcap 1.10.1. - Replaced legacy Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) identifiers for IIS services.
- Correction of TDS7 password encoding for mssql.lua , which assumed ASCII input even though other parts of the library passed it Unicode.
- Fix hostname/certificate comparison and matching to handle ASN.1 strings without null terminators, a bug similar to OpenSSL CVE-2021-3712.
- Problems with determining routing data on the FreeBSD platform have been resolved.
- Fixed an issue with detecting Linux network interfaces that don't have IPv4 addresses bound to them.
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 7.93 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.
Although 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-7.93.tar.bz2 bzip2 -cd nmap-7.93.tar.bz2 | tar xvf - cd nmap-7.93 ./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-7.93-1.x86_64.rpm rpm -vhU https://nmap.org/dist/zenmap-7.93-1.noarch.rpm rpm-vhU https://nmap.org/dist/ncat-7.93-1.x86_64.rpm rpm -vhU https://nmap.org/dist/nping-0.7.93-1.x86_64.rpm