Network Audit Tool

Synopsis

I recently completed setup of raspberry pi file server in my home network. In this process, I had to open up couple of ports to access my file server from public domain. I was actively looking for an open source network scanner to ensure I did not create vulanarability within my home network by opening up these ports to the internet. In this blog, I would like to talk about one such tool that comes in pretty handy to perform a network scan to identify network security vulnerabilities.

Introduction

nmap https://nmap.org/ is a pretty popular tool on the unix platforms there is also a gui version of this called Zenmap https://nmap.org/zenmap/ I will walk you through the setup and scanning of my raspberry pi server in this blog.

Setup

This is pretty startight forward, download the binaries from this location https://nmap.org/download.html and follow the details based on your target platform.

Configuration and Scanner

After successfull installation you may enter the ip address of any host within your network. In the screenshot below, I have entered the ip address of my PI

Click on the ports/hosts tab, you should be able to see a report indicating open ports and few additional details around what is runnin on those ports