Since I was busy with my new blog I missed writing about it: Nmap 7 Released on 19th of November.
Of course they did a good job, and improved performance, implemented fully IPV6-support and better ssl-scanning(using scripts), but the really surprise for me was that they also developed a better Netcat:
Ncat is a feature-packed networking utility which reads and writes data across networks from the command line. Ncat was written for the Nmap Project as a much-improved reimplementation of the venerable Netcat. It uses both TCP and UDP for communication and is designed to be a reliable back-end tool to instantly provide network connectivity to other applications and users. Ncat will not only work with IPv4 and IPv6 but provides the user with a virtually limitless number of potential uses.
We are excited and proud to announce that Ncat has been adopted by the Red Hat/Fedora family of distributions as the default package to provide the “netcat” and “nc” commands! This cooperation has resulted in a lot of squashed bugs and enhanced compatibility with Netcat’s options.
Some of the most exciting changes in Ncat 7 are:
Ncat now features an embedded Lua interpreter! Similar to the Nmap Scripting Engine, the “–lua-exec” option makes it easy to write simple traffic filters and daemons in easy-to-learn Lua. A collection of example scripts, including a simple HTTP server, is included with the Ncat source.
Ncat now supports Unix domain sockets (named pipes) on systems where those sockets are available. This is another Netcat compatibility enhancement, and it makes testing of Unix local services possible with Ncat.
Ncat’s proxy support was extended to support SOCKS5 with authentication.
More compatibility corrections resulted in correct handling of EOF on all sockets, whether running as a client or as a server. The new –no-shutdown option keeps Ncat up and receiving network input after stdin is closed, just like traditional netcat’s -d option.
