Masscan – World’s Fastest Scanner – Scan the Entire Internet in Under 6 Minutes

Masscan – Worlds fastest scanner can scan the entire Internet in under 6 minutes, transmitting 10 million packets per second. 

Masscan is an Internet-scale port scanner, useful for large-scale surveys of the Internet, or of internal networks.

While the default transmit rate is only 100 packets/second, it can optionally go as fast as 25 million packets/second, a rate sufficient to scan the Internet in 3 minutes for one port.

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It produces results similar to Nmap, the most famous port scanner. Internally, it operates more like scanrand, unicornscan, and ZMap, using asynchronous transmission.

The major difference is that it’s faster than these other scanners. In addition, it’s more flexible, allowing arbitrary address ranges and port ranges. In this Kali Linux tutorial, we introduce you to Massscan.

Also Read How to perform Information Gathering in Kali using NMAP – A Detailed Explanation

NOTE: It uses a custom TCP/IP stack. Anything other than simple port scans will cause conflict with the local TCP/IP stack. This means you need to either use the -S option to use a separate IP address or configure your operating system to firewall the ports that Masscan uses.

Downloading And Building Masscan

On Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install git gcc make libpcap-dev
$ git clone https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan
$ cd masscan
$ make

The source consists of a lot of small files, so building goes a lot faster by using the multi-threaded build:

$ make -j

Here is how you might use it:

masscan 10.0.0.0/8 -p443 -S 10.1.2.53 --rate 100000 --heartbleed

This command explained:

• 10.0.0.0/8 = the network you want to scan, which is all 10. x.x.x
• -p443 = the port(s) you want to scan, in this case, the ones assigned to SSL
• -S 10.1.2.53 = an otherwise unused local IP address to scan from
• –rate 100000 = 100-packets/second, which scans the entire Class A range in a few minutes
• –heartbleed = the new option that reconfigures masscan to look for this vulnerability

The output on the command line will look like the following:

Discovered open port 443/tcp on 10.20.30.143
Banner on port 443/tcp on 10.20.30.143: [ssl] cipher:0xc014
Banner on port 443/tcp on 10.20.30.143: [vuln] SSL[heartbeat] SSL[HEARTBLEED]

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