Tony I have a similar situation. The guy I am working for, has no idea about security and calls himself the Security Manager. And yet, wants everything tied up.
If I was you, I would a) Go above them if possible, sort of offline, in a conversation, see if direction/approval can come from further up the corporate ladder. b) Run it against a sample number of "hosts" show the kind of report you can develop, get it impressive, and then point out that this is only a sample, and that the whole thing should be done regularly and thoroughly. c) Run it against external facing hosts, maybe these are more "vulnerable" because they are visible to the outside world. I would not do this without letting as many people as possible know, that way if the shit does hit the fan, you did give as much notice as possible. By doing a passive scan you are only seeking possible vulnerabilities, not actually exploiting them so you should hopefully not cause any damage. Try Langaurd, http://www.languard.com, a free W32 scanner that checks for ports/services etc in passive only mode. I find it invaluable.. Good Luck James -----Original Message----- From: tony toni [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 12 March 2002 19:44 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Political Challenges Using Nessus Folks, I am currently experimenting with Nessus. I also have a spreadsheet of all IP addresses that our company uses (about 10,000) and it has a detailed description of each IP address. As you can appreciate a hacker would love to have this spreadsheet. My situation... I currently work in the Security Group and I *sort of* have approval to run Nessus to perform vulnerability assessments. This is a new responsibility that is being forced upon my director. He assigned me this project but has little interest in what I am doing, is a moron about security issues, and will be the first person to stab me in the back if anything goes wrong. However, he is also putting a lot of pressure on me to do the assessments and produce reports so he can look good to his VP. My next challenge is the Manager of the Server and Network Group. He is very territorial and is not responding to my requests for partnering with him while I run Nessus. He does not want audits done on his servers/firewall/routers. I think he is either afraid of what I will find out or I will cause some damage. He is also a moron on security issues. My problem... I am not sure if I can trust either my Director or the Manger of Network/Servers if I start running Nessus. Both have a keen sense of corporate politics and only look out for themselves. My manager want results..but then he offers no support and will *nail* me hard if I make any mistakes. I have been a *bad boy* of late and have been running Nessus on several production servers without telling anyone. Found lots of security weaknesses. None of the system admins are aware that I have run these tests (must not be looking at their logs). I want to continue running Nessus on switches, routers, firewalls and more servers. I want to really build a case for using Nessus and all of the security problems this company has. This is my question... 1) What are the political risks I may come incur if I run Nessus without formal approval? In other words, running Nessus against any IP address I want and without telling anyone what I am doing? I am afraid that if I list the IP's I want to go against...I will run into a bunch of political road blocks. I want to impress everyone that I can successfully run Nessus and not hurt anything and everyone will say great job. On the other hand...this could back fire on me and I could get *nailed* for doing these audits in the *stealth* mode. 2) From a technical viewpoint...can I run Nessus against a switch, router, firewall and not worry about bringing these devices down? Currently, I use the option "disable all dangerous plug-ins"....so I feel I using it safely. I am sure that others on this list have had the same sort of political challenges. I am impatient...I hate politics ..I know I can pull this off. Problem is management is getting in my way. What is your answers to my questions? Tony Security Project Lead Major Financial Institution on West Coast _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp. --- Incoming mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.336 / Virus Database: 188 - Release Date: 11/03/2002 --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.336 / Virus Database: 188 - Release Date: 11/03/2002
