Dominate GIAC Foundational Cybersecurity 2026 – Unlock Your Cyber Skills!

Nmap is a powerful network scanning tool that is capable of fingerprinting the operating system of a host. It achieves this by sending specially crafted packets to the target device and analyzing the responses received. The way a host responds to these packets can reveal a great deal about its operating system, including the version and configuration. Nmap uses a database of known OS fingerprints to make educated guesses about the operating system in use.

The other tools mentioned serve different purposes. For instance, netstat is primarily used for displaying network connections and routing tables, which does not provide OS-specific information. Dig and nslookup are DNS querying tools used to resolve domain names to IP addresses and vice versa, and they also do not provide any insights about the operating system of a host. Therefore, Nmap stands out as the correct choice due to its specialized capabilities in OS fingerprinting.