Nmap

Gordon Lyon (known in the Internet by his other name, “Fyodor”) is the man who maintains the leading Nmap Security scan tool.

The project started in 1997 as a mere port scanner for Linux and bearing no version number. Due to its popularity and high demand, they started developing the product. The growing rate of users made Nmap to devise a GUI version called "Zenmap", which was originally derived from Umit, a developed between the 2005 and 2006 Nmap Summer of Code, sponsored by Google.

Nmap can perform network inventory, list a service history, identify firewall types and pocket filers, and detect the uptime of the system and the OS. Its huge database may identify the OS fingerprints of the target system easily and reliably.

You can save your Nmap analysis output for later use, or just keep it as a reference. With its port scanning functionality, Nmap can find out which ports are open (both TCP and UDP) in the target systems. Depending on the switch used, you can really do “a brute force method” to actually identify the weaknesses of a system. Once you have done that you can close the unnecessary ports, so that you or your organization do or does not become any hacker’s next victim.

With the extremely flexible Nmap Script Engine (NSE), you can write your own scripts to customize your scanning processes. With the NSE you can really check Vulnerability Exploitations in the target systems, that is really a breakthrough.

Finally, you can find and identify "any device" connected to your network using Nmap - the only requirement is that this device has an IP address belonging to the network.

As a security product, it has received various awards from leading journals and websites.