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Nessus 3.2 BETA - IPv6 Scanning

Nessus 3.2 will support scanning of IPv6 addresses. The current BETA (released as Nessus 3.1.3) can be used to perform scans of IPv6 addresses. This blog entry shows how to use the current Nessus 3.2 BETA to perform such a scan from the UNIX command line.

Why Scan for IPv6 Addresses?

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Trimming the FAT

Tenable's research group today released a check for Nessus which discovers systems not-running NTFS file systems. For example, a system running on top of FAT32 would be detected by this plugin. The plugin is named "Insecure Logic Drive FileSystem" and has a Nessus ID of 24871.

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Nessus 3.2 BETA -- Example WMI library usage

The Nessus 3.2 BETA includes many new features, including a library that allows users to program their own WMI queries to Windows systems. This blog entry discuses some example WMI NASL scripts that make use of the new library and identify interesting asset and configuration information about Windows Hosts.

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Advanced Nessus 3 WMI Checks Against Windows Systems

Tenable Network Security has recently added the ability to query remote Windows systems via the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) protocol. This allows a credentialed Nessus 3 scan to perform some very advanced configuration audits of Windows systems. This blog entry discusses WMI, the initial checks developed by Tenable and how this can impact consultants and enterprise users of Nessus and the Security Center.

What is WMI?

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Nessus 3.0.5 Available

This point release provides fixes for multiple minor issues with Nessus 3.0.4. The fixes include:

  • Faster startup time, especially on laptops
  • Improved the performance of the SYN port scanner
  • Fixed a memory leak in the Mac OS X client
  • Vista compatibility improved
  • Various minor bugs fixed in the NASL engine
  • Better chasing of zombie processes

Platform specific changes include:

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Auditing Windows 2003 Servers for Disabled USB Drives and AutoRun CD-ROM

Many organizations have IT configuration polices that require CDs and USB drives to be disabled. This blog entry discusses a simple way to use a Nessus 3 .audit file to test a Windows 2003 server for the correct registry settings that disable "AutoRun" of programs on CDs as well as disables USB drives.

Windows 2003 Registry Settings

On Windows 2003 servers, the following registry setting controls "AutoRun" for CD drives:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom

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More Flexible Assessments of Windows ACLs

Tenable recently increased the flexibility of performing configuration assessments of Windows  access control lists (ACLs) with the Nessus compliance checks.

Previously, an ACL policy could only be built with exact understanding if it were "inherited" or "not inherited". For large numbers of checks, it might not make any difference if an ACL were inherited from someplace else or not, just that the actual ACL was correct.

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Enterprise Software Discovery with Nessus

If you are performing credentialed patch audits with Nessus, you can also create an inventory of installed software on each of your UNIX and Windows hosts. This blog post will review how Nessus can perform these tasks and what you can do with the results.

Finding Software on UNIX and Windows Systems

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Using Nessus 3 for OS X Configuration Auditing

Nessus 3 users who have subscribed to the Direct Feed service can audit the configurations of many OSes, including OS X. This blog entry will show the basic configuration of an OS X device to allow auditing by Nessus 3.

Configuring Remote Auditing for OS X

The first step to auditing an OS X system with Nessus is to allow remote SSH access. To do this, as an administrator of the OS X system, under sharing, enable "Remote Login" as is shown below:

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Understanding the Nessus "Safe Checks" Option

Nessus has more than 11,000 plugins which can be used to audit networks with host based checks and network checks. There are also many different options that Nessus users can configure to optimize their scans. One of these options is to enable or disable "safe checks". The "safe checks" setting allows Nessus users to enable a set of plugins within Nessus' library of vulnerability checks which Tenable feels can have negative effects on the network, device or application being tested.

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A Look Inside the Ransomware Ecosystem

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