WinPcap 3.1 and Nmapwin

Hey viewers,

i was told by a friend i should use the program WinPcap 3.1 and Nmapwin to help secure my network connections. I am currently building a new network in my home. On the netowork i will have two computer and my xbox live running. So, i don't confuse anyone, what purpose does running these programs serve.
Anyhelp information will do.

Lindows

NMAP is a flexible port scanner put out by the dudes at insecure.org and it's sole purpose to serve as a scanner that seeks out open ports on remote computers(any computer for that matter) which is useful for hackers that want to find services to exploit in a target and for network administrators that want to find weak points in their networks before the hackers do.

It is good practice to run it against your public interface(interface going outtwords the internet) and your private systems to see if you have any blatant open services that shouldnt be open(net bios ssn if your a windows user). You do need the winpcap libraries which allows for nmap to use certain lower level network functions. Beware if you plan to use it on windows, I know when sp2 was released they added another layer of protection against the creation of raw sockets(needed by nMAP) and Im not sure if nMAP devs were able to bypass the mechanism as of yet. I have faith in them if they already havent done it..

Cybersorcerer... yes they have worked around the raw sockets problem as was bound to happen

However I don't really recommend nmap4win.. not that its not a great win32 port.. I just don't find it reliable.. if you're in the windows world, try superscan from foundstone...


However if you work with non-plastic operating systems, you should have nmap.. it comes with most Linux distributions.

Beware the beta release of WinPcap 3.x as its not usable with some apps. I couldn't install it with snort so went to the stable version (3.0 I think whereas the beta is 3.1 I believe)

[code:1]However if you work with non-plastic operating systems[/code:1]

Thats a good one