Lion Cipher Lab
Discover what's running with Nmap — on your OWN lab machine
- SOC Analyst / Blue Team
- Beginner
- ~40 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
Before you can defend a machine, you have to know what it actually exposes. Every open port is a door, and most systems are quietly running more services than their owner realizes. Nmap is the tool defenders and administrators use to inventory that exposure — to answer "what is this box actually offering to the network, and did I mean to offer it?" Learning to scan a machine you own, read the results, and reason about them is foundational blue-team and asset-discovery literacy. It is also the exact first move of any legitimate security assessment: map what's there before you decide what to…
What you'll learn
- Nmap basics
- port scanning
- service and version detection
- asset discovery
- reading scan output
- authorized-use discipline
Steps in this lab
- The one rule, before you scan anything
- What Nmap is, in one breath
- Install Nmap
- Find your own target VM's lab IP address
- Run your first scan
- Read the output: open, closed, filtered
- Go deeper: what service and version is actually running
- What you just did — and why it's the defender's first move