Nmap is a free and open source utility for network exploration or security auditing. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics.


After more than five months, the Nmap team released a new version of the popular software, which contains hundreds of improvements, including:

• integration of over 3,000 IPv4 new OS fingerprint submissions, over 1,500 service/version detection fingerprints, and of the latest IPv6 OS submissions and corrections
• better IPv6 traceroute support
• new poll and kqueue I/O engines for improved performance on Windows and BSD-based systems including Mac OS X
• added support for Unix domain sockets
• 85 new NSE scripts
• 12 new protocol libraries
• Windows 8 improvements
• targets-sniffer is now capable of sniffing IPv6 addresses
• a number of bugs affecting the software's security, stability and productiveness fixed.