Nmap In A Nutshell

[lekt0r]

Hiya! I found this story to be very interesting. It seems Fyodor the mind behind Nmap is going to start writing a book of all things Nmap. Here is the email.

[MrLinus]

Interesting. If he does publish, I hope he goes with O'Reilly. I've always liked their style of books.

[lekt0r]

If he does publish, I hope he goes with O'Reilly.

Indeed, I am a huge fan of the O'Reilly line of books. I think its great that he has been offered to do something like this.

[thehorse13]

Fyoder actually put out an e-mail to the NMAP listserv:

Hi Guys,

A few publishers have contacted me about writing an Nmap book. I think this would make a valuable addition to the current (relatively terse and not example-driven) Nmap documentation. I hope to make much or all of the book available on the Web too, although that is subject to negotiation with publishers.

After some brainstorming, I have come up with two possible approaches. I would certainly appreciate your input as to the type of book you would buy and read. Here are my ideas:

1) "Network Reconnaissance with Nmap" - This book describes how to
conduct network security vulnerability assessments in stages,
starting from just an organization's name and leading up to
identifying their IP ranges, finding accessible machines,
circumventing firewalls, defeating intrusion detection systems,
enumerating open ports, identifying vulnerabilities, and finally
exploiting the systems. In carrying out these tasks, readers will
learn how and when to use the most popular and effective free
security tools, including the Nmap Security Scanner. This book is
platform-independent, covering Linux/UNIX, Windows, and Mac OS X.

2) "Nmap in a Nutshell" (actual title is publisher-dependent) - This
book describes the Nmap Security Scanner in depth. It covers the
myriad of ping and port scanning methods along with relevant
examples. Everything from the pervasive SYN scan to the more
obscure yet valuable methods such as Idle scan, ACK scan, and
custom-flag scanning are included. Hints are provided for
optimizing Nmap scanning speed, circumventing firewalls, defeating
IDS systems, remote OS detection, and more. All the common
platforms are covered, including the appropriate GUI frontends and
performance/usage tips. Particular effort is made to cover options
and features which are presently undocumented or poorly understood.
Solutions are provided for common tasks, such as parsing the XML
(or normal) output, and sweeping a huge address space for a single
port.

So the choices basically boil down to a book on vulnerability assessment which happens to focus on Nmap (but uses many other open source tools where appropriate), or a book on Nmap that provides examples for using it in vulnerability assessments and other situations where appropriate.

I would certainly appreciate your thoughts, as I plan to begin writing this week.

In other news, I made some improvements to Insecure.Org. The list archive has been renamed to http://seclists.org . I got sick of typing out lists.insecure.org all of the time . Given this depressed economy, I also added the SecurityFocus security-jobs list. A Google searchbar has been added to the lower-left margin of each Seclists.Org and Insecure.Org page. I set it to provide the results page (but not results themselves) in "h4xX0r sp34k", which will probably get me a lot of flames . If I get too many complaints about "unprofessionalism", I may just have to turn the search page black and fill it with rotating skulls and flaming torch images .

Cheers,
Fyodor

[KissCool]

I think that nearly everybody love O'reilly's books here. And a book written by Fyodor himself about Nmap would be great. I'm practically sure it would be a standard, like the camel book.
Anyway what would be the animal chosen for representing Nmap on a o'reilly cover, according to you?

[NullDevice]

well what u wuld like it to be...."Network Reconnaissance with Nmap" or "Nmap in a Nutshell"...
i wud personally like to have a combo of both...lets have "Network Reconnaissance with Nmap" which covers Nmap to sufficient depth.