The Nmap 5.00 network mapper (often refered to as just a port scanner) has been released this week, it is a major release like we haven’t seen in quite a few years. This new release now includes a few extra tools that were not present in prior versions of nmap. Most notably a new tool called Ncat aim to replace the venerable netcat and adds many new features that were not available in netcat such has SSL and IPv6 support. Additionally the Zenmap GUI has been updated with a number of features including a neat graphical network topology feature. Fyodor (main developer for nmap) has spent the summer scanning the internet and doing so was able to improve nmap performance dramatically. Bottom line is that you will want to update to nmap 5 if you haven’t already! Happy network mapping!