Re: Vulnerability Assessment

[Pete Herzog <lists () isecom org>]

Hi,

Just a thought but why?  Why do you want a vulnerability scanning tool? You 
never said.  How can we help you if you don't tell us why you need it. If 
you asked us to help you chose between 2 cars, we couldn't tell you which 
to buy unless you told us why you think you need a car and how it will be 
used.  So I'll give it a shot here:

If you say that you need to keep up on vulnerabilities than you're going in 
the wrong direction because they are not that current and you can forget 
about verifying against rumored 0days.

If you say you want to verify if the vulnerability is real then you're 
going in the wrong direction because they don't usually exploit.

If you say you want to spend a lot of money to make sure that you can check 
a whole backlog list of vulnerabilities against various services without 
having to think at all but think you can use it to cover your ass to 
management then you're right on and get the one that tickles your fancy 
(yay, I NEVER get to use that phrase anymore!).

There are easier ways and cheaper ways to do vuln management but they all 
require you to do the analysis (not the exploiting).  Which means know what 
you have and compare it to new exploits that come out.  It can even be 
automated.  When in doubt, you can use a verifying tool like Metasploit or 
one of the commercial ones like from Core Security.  Classes like the OPSA 
or OPST can go a long way to help you out here too.

Sincerely,
-pete.


jfvanmeter () comcast net wrote:
> My two shiny centvos --- I would use Nessus, its free, there is a port to Windows, you can write you own plugins, I've seen tenable fix fail postives in a day, if you want to pay for the plug in feed its only 1200 dollars US. if you pay for the plugin feed you can use the compliance checks, Tenable has pre configured checks you can download or you can write them yourself. 
>
> check it out, www.nessus.org
>
> I'm not a employee of Tenable Security, I've tried all of the others... Foundscan, retina, ISS, Satan, Saint, etc and I still personnel like Nessus. 
>  -------------- Original message ----------------------
> From: "Deepak Parashar" <deep231982 () gmail com>

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