From: charl van der walt (charl@sensepost.com)
Date: Fri Mar 07 2003 - 15:17:32 EST
hey,
> I think that using automated and "coin operated" scanner is
> fine so long as they are well understood, don't have the
> whole of security placed on them and that are used only to
> confirm security levels not as the only security.
i agree fully. the technology is often useless and may be downright
dangerous if not fully undestood and carefully used. in our case, that's
a large part of the thinking behind the support that we offer, is
completely integrated into the reports. we have very few clients who
would derive any real benefit from the service it it was backed by
skilled and experienced support personnel. having said that, the
combination of automated scanning and real-life support does allow for a
high-value low-cost solution.
in our model we believe that the customers who benefit the most from the
service are those that have large Internet infrastructure but have
already achieved a sufficient 'baseline' level of security. with those
customers we are often able to detect changes (new hosts, open ports,
changed configurations, DNS and the like) that could impact security.
this is the one scenarion where "coin operated" scanners can work well.
we have some thoughts on "Intranet" scanning also. our thinking there is
not to run full vulnerability scans at all. instead, we use Nessus to
continuously run scans for only a handfull of vulnerabilities that we
decided on previously together with the client. via a web interface we
indentify the machines that are vulnerable to each of the problems we
selected and graph the networks 'progress', i.e. whether the number of
vulnerable machines is actually getting less or not. if the number does
descend below an accpetable threshold we repeat the process with a new
set of vulnerabilties. in this way we're tackeling a big problem in
small steps. the configuration interface also allows us to run scans per
subnet and deliver the reports to the person responsible for that space.
my 2c
charl
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