Playing with Python – nmap XML port frequency
Two Python libraries have caught my attention lately, the first is lxml and the second is matplotlib. Ideally I wanted to write something short, just to get a feel for the basics of them. The goal was figuring out what I could do quickly so that I could play around with arguments and output, yet still have an actual result. I also wanted a nicely formatted useful XML file to parse. I ended up going with nmap's XML output. I also decided that I would plot the frequency of ports in the file.
Is this useful... perhaps? I could see a sys admin wanting a count of specific open ports on the network or a pen tester wanting to know the most common ports on a target network.
The python script is extremely basic and is called via nmap_port_frequency.py <XML Input> <png Output>. The result is an image similar to this:
The above image is the output from scanning three hosts.