Which option slash scanning times by avoiding DNS resolution?

• A. --traceroute
• B. -n
• C. --exclude
• D. -iL

Answer: (B)

Disabling DNS resolution eliminates time spent on reverse lookups, which speeds up a scan. The option that achieves this is the one that tells Nmap to use numeric addresses only and not perform any DNS queries. By enabling this mode, Nmap will not query DNS servers for hostnames, cutting out that potential delay and letting the scan proceed faster, especially when dealing with many hosts.

Use-case example: nmap -n 192.0.2.0/24 will scan that entire range using only the numeric IPs, with no DNS lookups attempted. If you provide hostnames instead of IPs while using this option, those hosts won’t be resolved or scanned, so numeric targets are the expected inputs when speeding things up this way.

The other options don’t primarily affect DNS resolution or scan speed in this way. A traceroute option adds route discovery overhead; an exclude option simply omits certain targets; and an input-file option reads targets from a file, potentially including hostnames that would require DNS lookups.