Many are quite taken by the new network scanners available today. One example is zmap, which is an impressive offering focused around large-scale Internet testing that offers some extraordinary scanning speeds.

I still prefer nmap.

Happily, I’m not sacrificing much speed. Nmap has been devoting significant effort to performance over the last couple of years. Here’s a quick portscan of a host on my network.

nmap -p- victim

Starting Nmap 6.40 ( http://nmap.org )
Nmap scan report for victim (172.16.24.17)
Host is up (0.0035s latency).
Not shown: 65530 closed ports
PORT      STATE SERVICE
4021/tcp  open  unknown
9147/tcp  open  unknown
3006/tcp open  unknown
22/tcp open  unknown
74/tcp open  unknown
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1.91 seconds

65,536 ports in less than 2 seconds. I remember when that would have taken close to a minute.

Don’t give up on Nmap. It has tons of history, a myriad of new features, and plenty of speed.

[ PROTIP: Replace nc with ncat—an Nmap project. ]