Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 71

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 71

Hosts: Paul Asadoorian, Product Evangelist and Carlos Perez, Lead Vulnerability Researcher

Announcements

• Several new blog posts have been published this week, including:
  • Analyzing the Compromise - without Going Hungry
  • Nessus "Exploitable With" Field Updated



• Check out our video channel on YouTube that contains the latest Nessus and SecurityCenter 4 tutorials.


• We're hiring! - Visit the Tenable web site for more information about open positions.


• You can subscribe to the Tenable Network Security Podcast on iTunes!


• Tenable Tweets - You can find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tenablesecurity where we make various announcements, provide Nessus plugin statistics and more!

Stories

• Security vulnerabilities galore in social networks - A new web site, www.socialnetworksecurity.org, has been created to document the ever increasing vulnerabilities present in popular social networking sites such as Facebook. It seems that many sites, as it will come to no great suprise, are vulnerable to things like XSS. I believe it's the nature of the beast, so many of these web sites are in a race to add features and functionality, and it's too time consuming for them to properly identify security vulnerabilities as they go along. I do hope that big web sites take a step back from the fast and furious pace and start to implement security, before they get too far down a path and end up with a site that requires a major overhaul to be "secure".

• inSSIDer 2 - Neat little wireless tool - Remember the days of NetStumbler? Those were fun, I know! Since then though many of the original wireless tools have not been kept up-to-date to support Windows 7 and 64-bit. Enter inSSIDer: it works with XP, Vista, and 7 (32 and 64-bit) and claims to use the native WiFi API to find wireless networks in your area and let you sort them or even correlate them with a GPS.


• Meet hacker's new best friends, Anti-virus and Firewalls - Turns out anti-virus software and firewalls have vulnerabilities too! How worried should you be about them though? It's an interesting question that begs debate.


• Monitoring Your Database - I find that so many environments ignore databases as a source for security information. If you really think about it, you should start implementing security at the database level because, well, that's where we keep the information. GreenSQL makes a free product for you to try out and you can use Tenable's enterprise tools to monitor and scan your databases and database systems.


• Good Tip on Snort DAQ - With Snort 2.9 came DAQ, or Data Acquisition Library, which abstracts the system calls to "get packets" into a self-contained library that supports PCAP and several other methods. For those running Snort, be warned: it requires some tuning and special attention, and some of the details are highlighted in this article.


• SSDs are Tougher to Erase Securely - It sounds silly, but you should have a method of physically erasing data, e.g. sledgehammer, fire, shotgun, whatever your favorite weapon of destruction happens to be. Maybe shredders need to have slots now for USB thumb drives.