Hi folks!  It has been a year since the last Nmap stable release
(5.21) and six months since development version 5.35DC1, so I'm pleased to release Nmap 5.50!  I'm sure you'll find that it was worth the wait!

A primary focus of this release is the Nmap Scripting Engine, which has allowed Nmap to expand up the protocol stack and take network discovery to the next level.  Nmap can now query all sorts of application protocols, including web servers, databases, DNS servers, FTP, and now even Gopher servers!  Remember those?  These capabilities are in self-contained libraries and scripts to avoid bloating Nmap's core engine.

I'm so excited about NSE that I made it the topic of my presentation with David Fifield last summer at Defcon and the Black Hat Briefings.
You can watch the video at http://nmap.org/presentations/.

Since Nmap 5.21, we've more then doubled the number of NSE scripts to
177 and NSE libraries jumped from 30 to 54.  They're all detailed at http://nmap.org/nsedoc/.

The actual NSE engine became more powerful as well.  Newtargets support allows scripts like dns-zone-xfer and dns-service-discovery to add discovered hosts to Nmap's scan queue.  We also added a brute forcing engine, network broadcast script support, and two new script scanning phases known as prerule and postrule.

This release isn't just about NSE.  We also added the Nping packet probing and analysis tool (http://nmap.org/nping/) in 5.35DC1.
Version 5.50 improves Nping further with an innovative new echo mode (http://bit.ly/nping-echo).

Meanwhile, we added 636 OS fingerprints and 1,037 version detection signatures to Nmap since 5.21, bringing the totals to 2,982 and 7,319, respectively.  No other tool comes close.

Some people complained that our Zenmap GUI was too slow to handle giant enterprise networks, so we put a lot of effort into performance.
Time taken to load our benchmark file (a scan of just over a million IPs belonging to Microsoft corporation) was reduced from hours to less than two minutes. We also gave Zenmap some new features, including a script selection interface and printing support.

I'll list hundreds of other changes later, but let's cut to the chase:

Nmap 5.50 source code as well as binary packages for Linux, Mac, and Windows are now available at:

http://nmap.org/download.html

If you find any bugs, please let us know on nmap-dev as described at http://nmap.org/book/man-bugs.html.