Hey everyone 👋

This is my first post here on dev.to! I'm currently taking a deep dive into Nmap, the powerful network scanning tool that so many security pros rely on. But instead of just reading results in the terminal, I wanted to go a step further…

💡 I'm pairing Nmap with Wireshark to observe the actual packets being sent and received during different types of scans.

So far, I've been experimenting with:

• SYN scans (-sS)
• Connect scans (-sT)
• OS detection (-O)
• Ping sweeps (-sn)

By watching the network traffic in Wireshark while I run these commands, I’m learning a ton about how each scan behaves under the hood — what packets are sent, what responses come back, and how Nmap builds its results.

This hands-on combo has been super insightful for understanding how tools like Nmap interact with networks at a packet level.

I'll be sharing more stuff soon.

Cheers to learning by doing 🛠️
-Matt