The Unicornscan was a result of a need for assisting security testers all over the world in terms of conducting tests on large scales, such as for large networks. It was also developed so as to consolidate and get together a lot of tools that were required for large scale operations of security testing. In the eyes of the developers of the Unicornscan, many of the current products at the time were way too slow to perform the scanning of thousands upon thousands of IP addresses. Along with that, the maintenance of many security tools at the same time can be daunting as well as tedious, so the developers of Unicornscan came up with a smart new product that combined everything required into an all in one solution to the problem.

The Unicornscan that runs on a typical computer of the Pentium series would can a single port on each of the IP addresses of a network in Class B. This task in itself is the equivalent of scanning sixty five thousand five hundred and thirty five (65,535) systems from as short as three seconds to as long as seven seconds. This would bring UDP scanning to a whole new level. Most of the available scanners that do UDP scanning may attempt to just make best guesses so as to determine whether the port under consideration is open, closed, or filtered. Most security testers think of UDP scanning as a method that is not quite reliable in terms of letting them discover live systems on some network. Even though Unicornscan can take care of UDP, IP, and ICMP port scanning operations, it makes the best use of UDP scanning out of all port standard port scanners available. This tool is part of the BackTrack DVD where it comes with a web based Unicornscan tool for analysis.