Vulnerability scanning with nmap
There are no security operating distributions without nmap, so far we have discussed how to utilize nmap during active reconnaissance, but attackers don't just use nmap to find open ports and services, but also engage nmap to perform the vulnerability assessment. As of 10 March 2017, the latest version of nmap is 7.40 and it ships with 500+ NSE (nmap scripting engine) scripts, as shown in the following screenshot:

Penetration testers utilize nmap's most powerful and flexible features, which allows them to write their own scripts and also automate them to ease the exploitation. Primarily the NSE was developed for the following reasons:
- Network discovery: Primary purpose that attackers would utilize nmap for network discovery, as we learnt in the active reconnaissance in Chapter 3, Active Reconnaissance of External and Internal Networks
- Classier version detection of a service: There are 1,000's of services with multiple version details to the same service, so...