Scan reports are useful to both penetration testers and system administrators. Penetration testers need to report their findings and include evidence of the target's weaknesses. On the other hand, system administrators keep a network inventory and monitor the integrity of their networks.

One common mistake made by security professionals and network administrators is to not use the reporting capabilities within Nmap to speed up the generation of these reports. Nmap can write the scan results in several formats, and it is up to the user whether to generate an HTML report, read it from a scripting language, or even import it into a third-party security tool to continue testing other aspects of our targets. In this chapter we will cover different tasks related to storing scan reports. We start by introducing the different file formats supported by Nmap. Additionally, we will give you tips, such as using Zenmap to generate a network topology graph, reporting vulnerability checks, and using PBNJ to store results in MySQL, SQLite, or CSV databases.

After learning the tasks covered in this chapter, you should be fully proficient in choosing the appropriate file format in which to store the scan results, depending on the operations that you plan on performing against the report.