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On August 10, Gordon Lyon, the creator of Nmap announced the release of Nmap 7.80 during the recently concluded DefCon 2019 in Las Vegas. This is a major release of Nmap as it contains 80+ enhancements and is the first stable release in over a year. The major highlight of this release is the newly built Npcap Windows packet capturing library. Ncap uses modern APIs and accords better performance, features and is more secure.

What’s new in Nmap 7.80?

  • Npcap Windows packet capture driver: Npcap is based on the discontinued WinPcap library, but with improved speed, portability, and efficiency. It uses the ‘Libpcap‘ library which enables Windows applications to use a portable packet capturing API and supported on Linux and Mac OS X. Npcap can optionally be restricted to only allow administrators to sniff packets, thus providing increased security.
  • New 11 NSE scripts added: NSE scripts has been added from 8 authors, thus taking the total number of NSE scripts to 598. The new 11 scripts are focussed on HID devices, Jenkins servers, HTTP servers, Logical Units (LU) of TN3270E servers and more.
  • pcap_live_open has been replaced with pcap_create: pcap_create solves the packet loss problems on Linux and also performance improvements on other platforms.
  • rand.lua library: The new ‘rand.lua’ library uses the best sources of random available on the system to generate random strings.
  • oops.lua library: This new library helps in easily reporting errors, including plenty of debugging details.
  • TLS support added: TLS support has been added to rdp-enum-encryption, which enables the regulation of protocol version against servers that require TLS.
  • New service probe and match lines: New service probe and match lines have been added for adb and the Android Debug Bridge, to enable remote code execution.
  • Two new common error strings: Two new common error strings has been added to improve MySQL detection by the script http-sql-injection.
  • New script-arg http.host: It allows users to force a particular value for the Host header in all HTTP requests.

Users love the new improvements in Nmap 7.80.

For the full list of changes in Nmap 7.80, head over to the Nmap announcement.

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Vincy Davis
A born storyteller turned writer!