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

Installing and activating Nessus


Nessus is a vulnerability scanner developed by Tenable Network Security. It scans hosts and subnets for network-level and service-level vulnerabilities. Nessus is available free of charge with restricted features for non-business users. It consists of two main components: NessusD (Nessus Daemon), and a client application that can be hosted on the same machine. Nessus Daemon is responsible for performing the scan and delivering the result to the client application, providing these results in various formats. Tenable also develops incremental updates and detection mechanisms, called plugins, which can be downloaded and updated regularly. It also provides additional probing functionality of known vulnerabilities; for example, if an FTP port is found to be open, Nessus will automatically try to log in using the anonymous user. Nessus has both a command line and web interface, but we will be mostly looking into the GUI-based web interface, due to its ease of use...