How to Update Nmap scanner database

Nmap (or Network Mapper) is probably the most popular network mapper around. However if you are running a very stable long-term support server, there are chances that your nmap database installation isn’t keep up to that.

Updating Nmap database

Nmap detection database consists of these files:

  • nmap-os-db
  • nmap-mac-prefixes
  • nmap-payloads
  • nmap-protocols
  • nmap-rpc
  • nmap-service-probes
  • nmap-services

What you need to do is to download  these files from Nmap Github project  page and copy it to /usr/share/nmap/ folder.

Alternatively, you can use this script ‘nmap-update.sh’ which I’ve created based on this gist.

Copy all the files to /usr/share/nmap/ once all of them have been downloaded.

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