Nessus Virtual Appliance
September 25, 2008Tenable Network Security has released a virtual appliance for the Nessus 3 vulnerability scanner. The VMWare appliance is available to ProfessionalFeed and Security Center customers. The appliance i...
Detecting Manually Compiled Network Daemons
September 22, 2008<p>Nessus plugin #<a href="http://www.nessus.org/plugins/index.php?view=single&id=33851">33851</a> (Network daemons not managed by the package system) is a credentialed check that audits each of the server processes on the audited Linux system. If the running process is not part of a known system package, the plugin reports that the program is the result of a hand-compiled solution. Below is a screen shot of the plugin detecting a hand compiled httpd program:</p>
Cyberespionage (Part III of a series)
September 19, 2008Hello again! In my last column, we looked at cyberterror and puzzled aloud about "if it's so horrible, why isn't it happening?" In this episode, we're going to tackle the most straightforward aspect o...
How to perform a full 65,535 UDP and TCP port scan with just 784 Packets
September 17, 2008Nessus has the ability to perform full port scans on UNIX and Windows systems by leveraging credentials. For UNIX systems, the “netstat –an” command is invoked and the results used to mark each report...
What BIOS does that PCI compliant server have?
September 16, 2008<p>Tenable’s research group recently added a Nessus <a href="http://www.nessus.org/plugins/index.php?view=single&id=34096">plugin</a> that makes use of a credentialed WMI query to determine the type of BIOS that has been installed on the audited computer. Similar plugins were added to perform the same task on UNIX systems via <a href="http://www.nessus.org/plugins/index.php?view=single&id=34098">SSH</a> as well as over <a href="http://www.nessus.org/plugins/index.php?view=single&id=34097">SMB</a>. The WMI and SMB plugins reside in the <a href="http://www.nessus.org/plugins/index.php?view=all&family=Windows">Windows plugin family</a> and the SSH plugin belongs to the <a href="http://www.nessus.org/plugins/index.php?view=all&family=General">General plugin family</a>. </p><p> </p>
Using Nessus to call Nikto
September 5, 2008Earlier this year, Michel Arboi wrote a blog post explaining how to use Nessus to call Nikto and incorporate the results into Nessus output. Most newcomers to Nessus have enabled the nikto.nasl wrappe...
Event Analysis Training - Advanced Blacklist Analysis
September 3, 2008DNS blacklists are publicly accessible lists of IP addresses that have been identified as associated with undesirable Internet behavior, mostly involving the sending of spam e-mails. Using lists of I...
Detecting Microsoft Executables Being Served by an Unknown Service with Nessus
August 28, 2008Many different types of malware and botnets require some sort of exploit payload. This payload can be obtained through traditional compromised services such as HTTP, FTP and even TFTP. Payloads can al...
64 Bit Patch Audits for Windows 2003
August 22, 2008Tenable's Research group recently added support to the Nessus ProfessionalFeed and HomeFeed to audit missing 64 bit Windows 2003 security patches via file version checks. File version checking is the...
Hacker Court 2008 Post Mortem
August 21, 2008Another Black Hat conference for the record books! It’s traditional for me to have a panic attack on the eve of Black Hat, trying to pull the Hacker Court team together to work on our presentation (“H...
Tenable Training, First Hand
August 5, 2008As a new Tenable employee, one of my first opportunities was to sit in on recently updated Nessus training classes taught by Tenable’s Training Lead, Matt Franz. Joining me in putting Matt on the hot ...
Hacker Court at Black Hat!
August 4, 2008Hacker Court is once again returning to the Black Hat Briefings! For our seventh Black Hat presentation, we will be conducting a mock court trial focused on the issues of entrapment, journalist privil...