Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By : Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar
Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By: Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar

Overview of this book

Digitization drives technology today, which is why it’s so important for organizations to design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities is one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure. This Learning Path begins by introducing you to the various concepts of network security assessment, workflows, and architectures. You will learn to employ open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning and use these results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. With a firm understanding of the basics, you will then explore how to use Nessus and Nmap to scan your network for vulnerabilities and open ports and gain back door entry into a network. As you progress through the chapters, you will gain insights into how to carry out various key scanning tasks, including firewall detection, OS detection, and access management to detect vulnerabilities in your network. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be familiar with the tools you need for network scanning and techniques for vulnerability scanning and network protection. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books: •Network Scanning Cookbook by Sairam Jetty •Network Vulnerability Assessment by Sagar Rahalkar
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

How to perform a vulnerability scan using Nessus


From following the preceding recipes, a user should be able to understand the creation and selection of a policy. Once the policy has been decided upon, all the user needs to do is to identify the host to be scanned, select the policy, and click Scan. The general scan time for Nessus for a noncredential scan of a single host with few ports open will take a couple of minutes. As the number of hosts and ports keeps increasing, the time required for the scan also becomes high.

Note

It is always recommended to inform the stakeholders before performing a Nessus scan, as it would allow an overhead of incident investigation on whether an attack was performed on the host and also inform network admins as to whether network bandwidth utilization may be higher than it is normally.

Getting ready

This section is the same as the Getting ready section of the How to manage Nessus policies recipe. This recipe will also require the user to have studied the previous...