Some feedback for everyone who helped with my question on security Vulnerability
scanners:
Nessus - It looks very nice, but it doesn't seem to work very well when doing
remote probes. Scanning the system it was installed on (My Home system,
Mandrake 7.1 w/ ipchains firewall) picked up a few potential holes vulnerable to
a local user, but scanning a remote Win98 system with file sharing open to the
net (complete with unpassworded shares) failed to even generate a warning. When
scanning the target system (openlinux 1.2) all it did was generate some general
warnings about services being available. ("Port 23 is running telnet, which is
insecure" etc).
I couldn't get Satan to work. On my home system it can't find perl to it's
satisfaction, and on the target system it compiles but when you launch it the
browser doesn't seem to work with the html properly - it just keeps trying to
save teh page instead of viewing it.
The Port Scan test at Gibson Research doesn't provide any information other than
to test if several common ports are open. The Shields Up! test works properly,
but all that does is check to see if you have netbios available to the server.
(Either from Windows file-sharing or from installing SAMBA)
Thanks all for your help, even if I didn't get the results I wanted. I'm
currently writing up a document explaining why it's a bad idea to have the
target system expose all it's services to the internet, even if there aren't
any well documented security exploits.
- Doug
--
_____________________________________________________________
Network Operations Engineer - Big Pond Advance Satellite
Ericsson Australia - Level 5, 184 The Broadway, Sydney 2000
Ph: +61-416-085-390 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
