User:Rungspeek/sandbox

Masscan is an open-source network scanner that can quickly scan large networks. In particular, it can scan the entire IPv4 Internet in under 5 minutes, from a single computer, when given sufficient network bandwidth (20-gbps) to the Internet.

Whereas other network scanners, such as the popular Nmap, focus on doing heavy scans of a small number of targets, masscan focuses on doing a large scan of a lot of targets.

Masscan can send packets as fast as the underlying platform allows. This is usually a software limitation. A virtual machine might be limited to 10-kpps and a standard Linux installation to 300-kpps. Tuning, or using a faster driver like PF_RING can increase speeds to millions of packets-per-second. .

Masscan is included in hacking tookits like Kali Linux, as well as many Linux distros. It's frequently used by ransomware criminals. . It's popular among defenders for scanning their own networks quickly.

When major new vulnerabilities are discovered, defenders will often use masscan in conjunction with another script to quickly find that vulnerability on the network. For example, after the BlueKeep vulnerability was disclosed by Microsoft, defenders used masscan and a script to quickly detect affected devices on their network.