Lion Cipher Lab
Scan your own home network with Nmap
- Penetration Testing / Red Team
- Beginner
- ~50 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
Before an attacker can break into anything, they have to know what is even there — which machines are alive, and which doors on those machines are open. That first step is called reconnaissance, and mapping a network is its heart: you find the live hosts, then you find the open ports and the services listening behind them. Nmap is the tool the whole security field, on both the attacking and defending sides, reaches for to do exactly this. Being able to install Nmap, work out which network you are on, list the devices that answer, and read which ports and services a machine is exposing is one…
What you'll learn
- understanding what an IP address, a port, a service, and a subnet actually are
- installing Nmap on Windows, macOS, or Linux from the official site
- opening a terminal and running your first command (zero prior terminal experience assumed)
- finding your own computer's IP address and subnet so you know exactly what range to scan
- using Nmap host discovery (a ping scan) to list which devices are alive on your OWN home network
- reading host-discovery results: what 'host is up' means, and how MAC addresses hint at what each device is
- running a port scan against a single machine you OWN to see which services it is offering
- reading port-scan results: the difference between open, closed, and filtered ports, and what a service and version tell you
- explaining why an attacker maps a network before doing anything else
- doing all of this strictly on a network and devices you own, never on anyone else's
Steps in this lab
- First, the one rule that makes this legal: your network, your devices, nobody else's
- The words you need first: IP address, port, service, subnet (from zero)
- Install Nmap (the free scanner) on your own machine
- Find out which network you are on: your own IP and subnet
- Host discovery: ask your network which devices are alive
- Read the host-discovery results and pick one machine you own
- Port scan the one machine you own
- Read the port results: open, closed, filtered, and what a service is
- Why attackers map first, what you proved, and where it takes you