The Nmap Scripting Engine

The Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) extends Nmap with scripts written in Lua. It turns Nmap from a port scanner into a flexible automation platform for discovery, version detection, vulnerability checks, and more.

Thousands of community scripts ship with Nmap, covering an enormous range of services and tasks.

NSE scripts are grouped into categories that describe their behavior and risk:

• safe: unlikely to harm the target.
• intrusive: may crash or disrupt services.
• vuln: checks for known vulnerabilities.
• auth, brute, discovery, exploit, malware: focused purposes.

Categories let you run a whole class of scripts at once.