SuperScan

SuperScan is a compact security tool that helps you detect open ports and gather information about hosts on a network. SuperScan is a TCP and UDP port scanner, pinger and hostname resolver that examines the computers you point it at.

One reason to scan these ports is to audit your own systems and see which services are reachable from the network. It can be very informative and educational to learn how systems respond, and it helps you build a more robust and secure configuration of your own.

SuperScan lets you scan a single host or a whole range of IP addresses. You can control the scan speed, choose the ports to test from customisable lists, and read the target addresses or ports from a file. For TCP it can use either connect or SYN scans, and you can adjust the timeouts to tune the scan for slow or fast networks. The program is small and portable, so it runs straight from its folder without installation. Results can be viewed as an HTML report for easier reading and comparison later on.

Once SuperScan finds a live host it can automatically run tools including ping, ICMP traceroute, whois and hostname lookups to help identify the machine it has found. These tools are also available on their own tab, so you can point them at a single address whenever you need them. You can log this information to a file so that you are able to compare results more easily on subsequent scans.

Version 4 added a Windows Enumeration feature. In addition to port scanning, you can gather details about a Windows computer, which can include NetBIOS information, the user accounts on the machine, the shares, and the services that are running.

SuperScan is a completely free program that runs on Windows. It was created by Foundstone, which later became part of McAfee, and it is a handy utility for network administrators and anyone learning about network security, although it is now legacy software that has not been updated for years.

SuperScan helps administrators and learners quickly find open ports and running services on the hosts they scan.