Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Evaluating Rapid7's Nexpose
From: Steve Brukbacher <sab2 () UWM EDU>
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:13:53 -0500
UW Milwaukee is also using this. We've been researching some potential false positives on an Ubuntu box but in our experience we haven't see an unreasonable number of false positives. In this case it looks like an issue of the numbers used to identify patch levels that are creating some false positives. We are basing a scanning service on the product but it's only a part of our overall strategy. On the upside I love the reporting features and the fact that they reference you to fixes for some problems. I'd say the biggest problem is that sometimes it can't find the device even though the address is on our net and publicly routable. This then returns a null set report. We haven't been able to identify how to allow for this on the assets themselves. It does have a capability to cache admin credentials which I've had some difficulty getting to work. In general though scanning is only part of the picture in ensuring our systems are meeting security requirements. In that context I think it's a good product. -- Steve Brukbacher, CISSP University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Information Security Coordinator UWM Computer Security Web Site www.security.uwm.edu Phone: 414.229.2224 Stelfox, Samuel G @ VTC wrote:
Vermont Technical College uses NeXpose as well and we have had mediocre experiences with it. It seems to miss some very serious security holes, does not list all the services that are running (or even make mention that the ports are open), and has a large number of false positives. It claims to have "verified" most of these false positives. On the other hand it did provide reasonable solutions most of the time that it detected a problem. I still highly recommend checking the solution with other people online as some of the solutions were excessive for a problem that it says may theoretically cause a problem as long as it was used with an additional exploit. For example the ICMP timestamp response. - Sam Stelfox -----Original Message----- From: Michael Bayne [mailto:baynema () JMU EDU] Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 11:28 AM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: [SECURITY] Evaluating Rapid7's Nexpose We're currently evaluating Rapid7's Nexpose vulnerability scanner. They claim to have a large install base in education, so I thought I'd see if any of you were using it and what your experience with it have been. I'm particularly interested in your estimates of false positives/false negatives, how you handle false positives in reporting, scalability, experiences with Rapid7's technical support, how well its database and web services scans work. The marketing guy was pushing the fact that all the vulnerability checks are stored in text files and custom vulnerability checks can be written. The scripting language for the checks seems to be proprietary, however, which makes writing custom checks a tad bit hard without documentation. Has anyone tried to write custom checks? Have you had custom checks written for you by Rapid7? Have you been able to get documentation about scripting from Rapid7? Any other thoughts you might want to share would be appreciated. Thanks.
Current thread:
- Evaluating Rapid7's Nexpose Michael Bayne (Apr 11)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Evaluating Rapid7's Nexpose Logan, Kimberly (loganks) (Apr 11)
- Re: Evaluating Rapid7's Nexpose Conor McGrath (Apr 11)
- Re: Evaluating Rapid7's Nexpose Stelfox, Samuel G @ VTC (Apr 11)
- Re: Evaluating Rapid7's Nexpose Jason Carr (Apr 11)
- Re: Evaluating Rapid7's Nexpose Ferris, Joe (Apr 12)
- Re: Evaluating Rapid7's Nexpose Steve Brukbacher (Apr 12)