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)

Understanding the Nessus Audit policy and its customization

The Nessus Audit files consist of custom XML-based rules which are needed to perform configuration audit for various platforms. These files allow the user to perform value and regex-based comparisons of the current configuration and determine the gaps present. In general, it is expected that these audit files are prepared in line with the industry standard baselines so that the actual compliance gaps are shown and the administration team can work on hardening and compliance at the same time. A custom audit file is to be saved with the extension .audit.

The following is a generic syntax of a check in the audit files:

<item>
name : " "
description : " "
info : " "
value : " "
</item>

We will...