Nmap as a vulnerability scanner

How do you discover vulnerabilities in your network? It is clear that some vulnerabilities (e.g., network design vulnerabilities) need more than a scanner to be identified. There are various commercial and free tools to scan your assets and determine if they are up-to-date and if they are properly configured. Nmap is one of those tools that can be used as a vulnerability scanner. The NSE (Nmap Scanning engine) provides various scripts to check operating systems, services and devices for a specific vulnerability. There are also scripts such as vulners which check the target against a number of vulnerabilities. According to the project page you can use it as follows:

nmap -sV --script vulners [--script-args mincvss=<arg_val>] <target>

Note that the script needs the software version to work correctly, hence the ''-sV'' switch is used.