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When you think about celebrities, you probably think about actors and rock
stars. Although definitely not as mainstream as movies and music, the information
security world has its celebrities as well. They don't get followed
around by the paparazzi, the 20-million dollar checks are just the stuff of their
dreams and they don't usually go around dressed to kill, but we certainly have
individuals that can be defined as security rock stars. One of those is Gordon
Lyon aka Fyodor, the creator of Nmap, a free and open source utility for
network exploration and security auditing.
Setting aside the big security events and the
countless mentions in books and on the Internet,
his software has the added distinction of
being featured in major motion pictures such
as The Matrix, Battle Royale and Die Hard 4.
Not to mention that it's probably one of the
most used tools in the software toolkit of
every security professional out there.
Although it's being updated and refined on a
regular basis, Nmap recently reached version
5 that brought a considerable number of fixes
as well as principal improvements. When discussing
the development of this big update, in
a conversation with (IN)SECURE Fyodor said:
"Our last major release was 4.50 in December
2007. But we've been working on some of the
new 5.00 features even longer. For example,
we started Ncat development 2005 and we
finally feel that it is ready for production use."
Features
Nmap runs on all major computer operating
systems, and official binary packages are
available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
Here are the top improvements in Nmap 5:
1. The new Ncat tool aims to be the Swiss
Army Knife for data transfer, redirection, and
debugging. A users' guide detailing security
testing and network administration tasks with
Ncat has been released.
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