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

Selecting a compliance scan policy


An entire compliance scan or audit is different from a typical vulnerability scan; it is completely dependent on the plugins and the Nessus audit file. We have already covered the basics on how to download and update the plugins in Chapter 2, Understanding Network Scanning Tools. We will now uncover further details about plugins and the Nessus audit file. In this recipe, we will look how to select the correct baseline policy from the set of policies that come preloaded in Nessus, in order to perform a configuration audit for a Linux host.

 

Plugins

Each plugin consists of syntax to check for a specific vulnerability for a version or multiple versions of the software, services, and operating systems. A group of plugins for a similar operating system/service/software are grouped as a plugin family, shown as follows:

These plugin families expand into different plugins that each perform a specific check. A user cannot manually add a plugin; they can only download...