Re: Re: Vulnerability scanning across Firewall

From: Nathan Keltner (shiftnato@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Jun 06 2006 - 16:00:01 EDT


It sounds like you guys might not be performing any assessments from
an external perspective yet. (External/internal is sort of a sliding
scale today, as opposed to the fortress mentality everyone used to
have; it sounds like in your case, its probably best to think of the
Internet as the most external, your User LAN somewhere closer, with
the local segment being the closest of all.) All things the same,
external should have priority over internal, but that unfortunately
doesn't mean you can rule out attacks coming from the internal.

It's possible that your MIS staff, vendors, and whoever else plugs
into your server LAN may pose just as great a risk (likelihood of an
attack coming from there) as your segregated User LAN. And if your
users are doing lots of things on your Server LAN, its likely the
firewall segregating the two is full of holes -- it has to be to allow
the necessary traffic.

If your company is just starting vulnerability assessments for the
first time, start with scanning from the Internet to see what someone
from there would see, identify things that should be fixed, then move
to your User LAN, repeat, then to your server LAN. After your first
round or two, determine some sort of a schedule and have it done as
often as makes sense for your environment (keeping in mind applicable
regulations that may play a part). You'll have to assess what makes
the most sense for your environment.

Regards,
Nathan Keltner

On 6 Jun 2006 07:20:13 -0000, tarunthenut@gmail.com
<tarunthenut@gmail.com> wrote:
> We are scanning the servers from same segment and we get a big list of vulnerabilities.
>
>
> We are thinking of scanning the servers from Internet and User LAN (Identified attack vectors), both are seperated using stateful firewall (cisco/checkpoint). That way we would get a list of only those vulnerabilities that are actually exposed inspite of presence of a security control (Firewall) and we can patch these exposed list on priority and the remaining vulnerabilities during the periodic maintenance schedule.
>
>
> Whatever difficulties we would face due to presence of a security control, a person with malicious intent would also face same problem due to presence of the same control.
>
>
> Any thoughts anyone?
>
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This List Sponsored by: Cenzic

Concerned about Web Application Security?
Why not go with the #1 solution - Cenzic, the only one to win the Analyst's
Choice Award from eWeek. As attacks through web applications continue to rise,
you need to proactively protect your applications from hackers. Cenzic has the
most comprehensive solutions to meet your application security penetration
testing and vulnerability management needs. You have an option to go with a
managed service (Cenzic ClickToSecure) or an enterprise software
(Cenzic Hailstorm). Download FREE whitepaper on how a managed service can
help you: http://www.cenzic.com/news_events/wpappsec.php
And, now for a limited time we can do a FREE audit for you to confirm your
results from other product. Contact us at request@cenzic.com for details.
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