How to Run the Latest Version of Nmap on Ubuntu

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Trinity doing her Nmap thing

Nmap is constantly upgrading, so it’s best to have the latest version. Especially when you factor in its application identification and NSE functionality, which benefit significantly from being fresh.

The problem for us is that while new versions of Nmap have .rpm files ready to go, there are no .deb versions released for Debian/Ubuntu users.

TL;DR: Download latest, .rpm, convert with alien, and install with dpkg.

But there’s a solution. All you have to do is an extra step using a command called alien that converts RPM files to DEB files. So here’s the whole sequence.

Download the latest RPM package

Change the package name according to whatever’s latest.

wget https://nmap.org/dist/nmap-7.60-1.x86...

Make sure you have alien installed

You can also just install from source as well.

You might not probably don’t have alien installed. So let’s get it.

apt install alien

Convert the RPM file to a DEB file using alien

Now alien is installed and you can use it to convert the RPM into a DEB file.

alien nmap-7.60-1.x86_64.rpm

Install the DEB package

You may have to uninstall ndiff if you have it installed. apt remove ndiff.

So now you have a working .deb package that you can install.

dpkg -i nmap-7.60-1.x86_64.deb

And now you should have the latest version of nmap.

nmap –version

Nmap version 7.60 ( https://nmap.org )

Happy scanning!

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Stay curious,

Daniel