Unicornscan has always been a favourite of mine, especially for UDP scanning and scanning large networks (and getting it done fast).
Unicornscan is a new information gathering and correlation engine built for and by members of the security research and testing communities. It was designed to provide an engine that is Scalable, Accurate, Flexible, and Efficient. It is released for the community to use under the terms of the GPL license.
In some ways the implementation is better than Nmap – in some ways worse. Both are great tools and for me they work well hand in hand, both have certain advantages over the other in different situations.
I did get half way to writing an article about Nmap vs Unicornscan for large network scanning.
Benefits of Unicornscan
Unicornscan is an attempt at a User-land Distributed TCP/IP stack. It is intended to provide a researcher a superior interface for introducing a stimulus into and measuring a response from a TCP/IP enabled device or network. Although it currently has hundreds of individual features, a main set of abilities include:
- Asynchronous stateless TCP scanning with all variations of TCP Flags.
- Asynchronous stateless TCP banner grabbing
- Asynchronous protocol specific UDP Scanning (sending enough of a signature to elicit a response).
- Active and Passive remote OS, application, and component identification by analyzing responses.
- PCAP file logging and filtering
- Relational database output
- Custom module support
- Customized data-set views
Anyway on the news – Unicornscan has finally been updated and v0.4.7 is available and released for download.
Unicornscan has also been awarded 2nd place in the security category for this years Les Trophees du libre 2007 (http://www.tropheesdulibre.org).
You can download Unicornscan here:
Source Code: unicornscan-0.4.7-2.tar.bz2
Fedora Core 8 RPM: unicornscan-0.4.7-4.fc8.i386.rpm
Or read more here.
Documentation is available here: Unicornscan-Getting_Started.pdf
