Software update: Nmap 7.31

Nmap is a program for exploring and monitoring a network. It is designed to scan a large network without delays and also runs smoothly on a single host. The program uses raw ip packets to retrieve active hosts and information about available services. It comes bundled with NSE, which lets you scripts can be used to detect security leaks, similar in idea to Nessus or OpenVAS. In addition, it is bundled with Zenmapwhich generates a visual topology of the detected network environment, and with Ncat, which allows you to intercept, analyze, modify, and so on network traffic. More information about the possibilities can be found at this page† The developers have released Nmap 7.31 with the following announcement on the mailing list:

Nmap 7.31 stability-focused point release

Hi folks. I’m happy to report that the big Nmap 7.30 release last month was a great success. We didn’t even see as many bugs as expected for such a large release, but we have collected and fixed the ones which did arise in the last few weeks into a new 7.31 point release. It includes the latest updates to our new Npcap driver, a fix for Nping on Windows, and more.

Nmap 7.31 source code and binary packages for Linux, Windows, and Mac are available for free download from the usual spot.

If you find any bugs in this release, please let us know on the Nmap Dev list or bug tracker.

Here are the changes we put in since 7.30:

• [Windows] Updated the bundled Npcap from 0.10r2 to 0.10r9, bringing increased stability, bug fixes, and raw 802.11 WiFi capture (unused by Nmap).
• Fixed the way Nmap handles scanning names that resolve to the same IP. Due to changes in 7.30, the IP was only being scanned once, with bogus results displayed for the other names. The previous behavior is now restored.
• [Nping][GH#559] Fix Nping’s ability to use Npcap on Windows. A privilege check was performed too late, so the Npcap loading code assumed the user had no rights.
• [GH#350] Fix an assertion failure due to floating point error in equality comparison, which triggered mainly on OpenBSD: assertion “diff <= interval" failed: file "timing.cc", line 440 This was reported earlier as [GH#472] but the assertion fixed there was a different one.
• [Zenmap] Fix a crash in the About page in the Spanish translation due to a missing format specifier: File “zenmapGUI\About.pyo”, line 217, in __init__ TypeError: not all arguments converted during string formatting
• [Zenmap][GH#556] Better visual indication that display of hostname is tied to address in the Topology page. You can show numeric addresses with hostnames or without, but you can’t show hostnames without numeric addresses when they are not available.
• To increase the number of IPv6 fingerprint submissions, a prompt for submission will be shown with some random chance for successful matches of OS classes that are based on only a few submissions. Previously, only unsuccessful matches produced such a prompt.

Enjoy this new release and please do let us know if you find any problems!

cheers,
Fyodor