Tenable Blog

Nessus 3 UNIX scanners have the ability to save all of their generated packets as a convenient libpcap compatible file. This means you can save your scans and view them under applications such as TCPDUMP or Wireshark. Please note that this feature is not available on Nessus 4.

Why is this Useful?

There are many reasons to do this.

Tenable Network Security has received certification from the Center for Internet Security to perform configuration audits of the Solaris 9 and SuSE Linux 9 operating systems. Audits can be performed with Nessus 3 scanners subscribed to the Direct Feed as well as by enterprise networks with the Security Center.

There are a few events occurring before the end of the year that Tenable will be participating in:

2007 DHS Security Conference and Workshop
Baltimore Maryland, August 27-30, 2007
I will be speaking at 3:45 this Monday, August 27 about how configuration management changes the way network security monitoring and incident response occur in non-obvious manners. Many of these sessions are only open to the US government.

Several weeks ago, a good friend of my family who is a lawyer for an application hosting company and I were speaking about network security and I brought up Nessus. "Can you scan one of our hosted sites?" he asked. A short while later, especially after asking the right sort of legal questions, we were looking at the results of a non-credentialed Nessus scan for a high traffic web site.

His web site didn't have any "application" content and hosted static HTML web pages. The only odd thing to note was an SSH server found on a very high port.

"Is that bad?" asked my friend.

The Office of Management and Budget recently released new configuration guidelines for Windows XP and Vista that all Federal agencies need to adopt by February 1, 2008. The guidelines are known as the "Federal Desktop Core Configurations" (FDCC) and have been published as part of the NIST Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) program.