John the Ripper vs. Nmap

It is best suited in those environments where complexity is not the key. We've used it fairly extensively in our UNIX to find weak UNIX passwords and in Windows environments too. It's very easy to get hold of as it is essentially Open Source, although a paid version is now available and we are thinking of looking at this proposition in-depth to see if it is viable. We found it easy to install and deploy across our systems. Patching was fairly regular, so we always had the latest version. It holds its own against DES and Blowfish encryption algorithms among many others.

Incentivized

Nmap is the ideal solution if you are working alot in network environments. If you come to grips with the syntax and the most-used features (the online community helps alot), you will be able to much more quickly and thoroughly troubleshoot networks or check for security vulnerabilities, for instance. It is free to use and is available for Windows and Linux, so I would say it is very much warrented for any network administrator or sysadmin to take it out for a spin.

Incentivized

• Easily finds plantect passwords.
• Simply detects passwords hashes.
• Has a fully bespoke cracker that can be modified to users requirements.
• Excellent for UNIX and Windows usage.

Incentivized

• Nmap is very good at discovering systems on your network.
• Nmap is very good at guessing a systems operating system with a high degree of accuracy.
• Nmap is good at validating externally facing systems to make sure that unauthorized access is not allowed.

Incentivized

• It needs to be modified to be able to break SHA 256, 512 and the lastest hashes.
• Can be slow and wildly against the lastest hashes.
• Require admin access to set up account.
• Old and is being superseded by better applications.

Incentivized

• exporting, There's a serious lack of ability to export the information in a readable format to present to VPs and such. I always find myself doing a lot of data massaging to get it in a pretty format
• some scans can trigger sensitive IDS/IPS
• SYN scans can be particularly aggressive and cause problems on remote systems.

Incentivized

Nmap uses are very practical and I don't think there is a better tools for what Nmap does. It is open-sources that therefore there is no cost to use it. It offers a number of benefits, including but not limited to network mapping, port scanning and more. It is very reliable as a network scanning tool.

Incentivized

There is a very large support community and a robust selection of add-ons and scripts. Once you get the use down this is one of the most powerful tools and you can find anything you are looking for as far as examples on the web. While not having official support its not lacking by any means.

Incentivized

'John the Ripper' being open source was free to use, whereas the others had to be paid for. It was very simple to install and runs against many hundreds of hashes and crypts. It is always developing thanks to large communities on GitHub.

Incentivized

A similar but more basic alternative is available on Android, called Fing. It's very useful for diagnosing issues on networks when you only have your mobile device to hand.

A graphical user interface alternative to Nmap, is Zenmap. It's the official GUI for Nmap and does use Nmap under the hood. It makes things a bit more 'point and click'.

Incentivized

• Helped us achieve initial Password Auditor goals and targets.
• Simple and cheap to deploy, so have saved greatly compared to paid for products.

Incentivized

• NMap being free of charge has a positive impact on our budget. It is an enterprise-class tool that anyone can download and use.
• NMap, both command line and GUI, is a very advanced tool that is easy to use, so there's very little learning curve involved, which has a positive impact on productivity and security.
• A valuable feature that is a huge time saver is that you can compare scans. This saves hours of searching manually for differences in scan results. Faster results means faster mitigation of problems, which can be a real money saver.

Incentivized