Network recon
Explore the Zenmap GUI, look at network traffic with EtherApe, and sniff packets with Wireshark.
If you want to defend your own network, and indeed if you’ve just broken into someone else’s network, you’ll want to map out all the machines and services running on there. Nmap does this (it’s literally short for Network Mapper), but we want to go further. The natural next step is Zenmap, Nmap’s official GUI. This isn’t installed in BackBox but you can remedy this (on any Ubuntu-based distro) with sudo apt install zenmap . That adds an icon to your applications menu (in BackBox, it’s in the Internet submenu). If you don’t run it using the ‘as root’ option, you get a warning about some scan types not being available, as we covered and which we’ll go into more detail about.
The Zenmap interface is easy to navigate and keeps track of every scan it performs in the Hosts column on the left. The Profile drop-down enables you to choose between scan types and the Command box shows (and lets you dictate) the parameters that Nmap will be launched with. Incidentally, the -T option (used in many of the included profiles) is used to limit the delay between connection attempts, speeding things up. It still takes a couple of minutes to scan all ports and do service detection on a machine on your network, though. You can save the results of any revealing scans you do from the Scan menu in the top-left.