Tenable Blog

Earlier 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 wrapper only to find it produced no output. Some Nessus users have found various ways to ensure Nikto was called correctly and the output displayed. Others chose to run Nikto separately for various reasons. The following guide will explain how to easily configure Nessus to properly call Nikto.

Many 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 also be delivered by highly customized or proprietary protocols designed by the malware and botnet creators. 

Tenable’s research team has encountered some ports that can't be fingerprinted and appear to start an executable download when they are connected to. This is a tactic that some of the botnets use to infect additional machines.

Another 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 (“Hack MyFace”) and swearing I’m never doing this again. This year was even worse: the defendant, Simple Nomad, and the judge, Richard Salgado, both had to cancel at the last minute.

Hacker 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 privilege and wiretapping, titled "Hack MyFace."

What is "Hacker Court?"

Hacker Court is a loose organization of attorneys, security professionals and hackers with the goal of demonstrating the dynamics, frustrations and complexity of computer crime trials.

Tenable's Research group recently added the ability to perform WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation)  queries to Windows servers and desktops as part of a Nessus configuration audit. These new features allow for rapid and in-depth auditing of a wide variety of configuration settings that are only available through WMI. This blog entry describes how the new API works, and includes several examples.