Book Image

Network Scanning Cookbook

By : Sairam Jetty
Book Image

Network Scanning Cookbook

By: Sairam Jetty

Overview of this book

Network scanning is a discipline of network security that identifies active hosts on networks and determining whether there are any vulnerabilities that could be exploited. Nessus and Nmap are among the top tools that enable you to scan your network for vulnerabilities and open ports, which can be used as back doors into a network. Network Scanning Cookbook contains recipes for configuring these tools in your infrastructure that get you started with scanning ports, services, and devices in your network. As you progress through the chapters, you will learn how to carry out various key scanning tasks, such as firewall detection, OS detection, and access management, and will look at problems related to vulnerability scanning and exploitation in the network. The book also contains recipes for assessing remote services and the security risks that they bring to a network infrastructure. By the end of the book, you will be familiar with industry-grade tools for network scanning, and techniques for vulnerability scanning and network protection.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

How to manage Nessus policies

We already learned a great detail about Nessus policies in Chapter 2, Understanding Network Scanning Tools. For a quick recap, the Nessus scan policy consists of various settings and content, which is to be used while performing a Network Vulnerability Scan or Compliance Audit. This scan can be created by any Nessus user and can be made available for other users who can then also perform a scan. These policies can be duplicated, imported, and exported based on the user requirements. The only limitation of the policy export is that host-specific data such as Nessus audit files and credential details cannot be exported. These policies are available as part of the resources menu mentioned on the home screen once the user logs in to the Nessus web console:

When a user tries to create a new policy, Nessus provides preexisting scan templates, which can...