No Ping Scan

Published Dec 20, 2022
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A no ping scan prevents Nmap from doing any host discovery. It is specified with the -Pn option. By default, Nmap only probes active machines found via host discovery. With this option selected, Nmap will do the requested scanning functions against every target IP specified, as if every one is active. This is done when it is important to find every possible active machine, including ones that may not be responsive to host discovery.

Note: This option is often combined with a no port scan (-sn).

Syntax

nmap -Pn <target>

This performs a scan of <target> without doing host discovery.

Example

The following example runs a no ping scan on the site scanme.nmap.org:

nmap -Pn scanme.nmap.org

Note: scanme.nmap.org is a domain set up explicitly for people to test Nmap with.

This results in the following output:

Starting Nmap 7.93 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-12-02 12:14 Eastern Standard Time
Nmap scan report for scanme.nmap.org (45.33.32.156)
Host is up (0.083s latency).
Other addresses for scanme.nmap.org (not scanned): 2600:3c01::f03c:91ff:fe18:bb2f
Not shown: 992 closed tcp ports (reset)
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp filtered smtp
80/tcp open http
135/tcp filtered msrpc
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
9929/tcp open nping-echo
31337/tcp open Elite
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 22.30 seconds

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