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This is what wikipedia says: "In 1995, Assange wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner. Strobe inspired Fyodor to develop the Nmap port scanne
by mixmax 16y ago
This is what wikipedia says: "In 1995, Assange wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner. Strobe inspired Fyodor to develop the Nmap port scanner."
Is that incorrect, or weren't the other ones open source? I'll trust you over wikipedia :-)
- tptacek 16y agoThere were definitely port scanners before Strobe, but Strobe was the fastest port scanner. The notion that there would have been a commercial port scanner in 1995 strikes me as funny. If you just need me to "win the bet" here I'll point out that even SATAN scanned ports, and the netcat man page (also '95) shows how to use it as a port scanner. Hobbit "invented" UDP port scanner (which Strobe didn't do) in '94. If you were thinking that maybe portscanning was an original idea, I'll recommend that you research NUAA (a "port scanner" for X.25 networks) and Tone-Loc (a "port scanner" for telephones). Remember that 1994 is before the web and before ISDN. The Internet was mostly a means to get on IRC, which was in large part a place to talk about attacks on dial-up systems. This is back in the days where there was a "commercial" UUNet and a "noncommercial-only" NSFNet, and actual splits between the two. To some attackers, a high-quality NUA scanner might have been more valuable than a high-quality TCP scanner. Who scans TCP ports when 1/3 of Unix systems are running rexd and another 1/3 are exporting / to "everybody"? For the record, I 100% believe Strobe inspired Fyodor. I don't want to take anything away from Strobe. It was impressive for its time. (Late edit: I'm reminded by a friend that Pluvius wrote pscan.c before Proff wrote Strobe. So there.) (Later edit: here's probe.c from Phrack in '94: http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=46&id=23 http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=46&id=23 [look for probe_tcp_ports]).