Rhinovirus

Final exams, moving out of my apartment, and now activly working on Nmap related projects; this week has been pretty busy for me. But atleast my Nmap projects are pretty interesting. I’m working on two major ones right now: –top-ports, and OS finger print integration assistant.

–top-ports is pretty cool, normally nmap scans check a vast range of ports – most of which arent open 90% of the time. I will be checking for which ports are most frequently open in the real world through empirical testing, this feature could potentially speed up many Nmap scans. There has already been a few third party internet portscans – most interesting is ACK-RST – the diffrence between the ACK-RST survey is I will feature far more hosts and I will be scanning the entire port range.

The second feature is something that you as an Nmap user will never get to use, see, or even notice; it is something for the core Nmap developers. Currently the OS fingerprinting database is edited almost manually with only a few basic utilities to help out which ever poor soul gets stuck with the task. I will be writing a GUI utility to make the task far easier and quicker. As a plus for the end user, this means that the main developers will have more time for coding actal features, as they will be wasting less time editing text mode databases.

-Michael