Identifying open ports on a target computer in preparation for auditing.

Auditing the security of a computer, by identifying the network connections which can be made to it.

OS Detection - Remotely determining the operating system and some hardware characteristics of network devices.

Version Detection - Interrogating listening network services listening on remote computers to determine the application name and version number.

Port Scanning - Enumerating the open ports on one or more target computers.

Host Discovery - Identifying computers on a network, for example listing the computers which respond to pings, or which have a particular port open.

Linux is the most popular nmap platform and Windows the second most popular. Nmap runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, and BSD (including Mac OS X), and also on AmigaOS. These include operating system, device type, uptime, software product used to run a service, exact version number of that product, presence of some firewall techniques and, on a local area network, even vendor of the remote network card. In addition Nmap may be able to determine various details about the remote computers. Just like many simple port scanners, Nmap is capable of discovering passive services on a network despite the fact that such services aren't advertising themselves with a service discovery protocol.

It may be used to discover computers and services on a computer network, thus creating a 'map' of the network. Nmap is a security scanner originally written by Gordon Lyon (also known by his pseudonym Fyodor Vaskovich). Jump to: navigation, search Nmap Security Scanner

What is zenmap typically used for