Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 544 pages
- Published by: Syngress
- Edition: 1st Edition July 20, 2004
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 1931836086
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-1931836081
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Book Dimensions:
9 x 7 x 1.3 inches
- Weighs: 2 pounds
Product Description
This book focuses on installing, configuring and optimizing Nessus, which is a remote security scanner for Linux, BSD, Solaris, and other Unices. It is plug-in-based, has a GTK interface, and performs over 1200 remote security checks. It allows for reports to be generated in HTML, XML, LaTeX, and ASCII text, and suggests solutions for security problems. As with many open source programs, Nessus is incredibly popular, incredibly powerful, and incredibly under-documented. There are many Web sites (including nessus.org) where thousands of users congregate to share tips, tricks, and hints, yet no single, comprehensive resource exists. This book, written by Nessus lead developers, will document all facets of deploying Nessus on a production network.
About The Author
Jay Beale is a security specialist focused on host lockdown and security audits. He is the lead developer of the Bastille project, which creates a hardening script for Linux, HP-UX, and Mac OS X; a member of the Honeynet Project; and the Linux technical lead in the Center for Internet Security. A frequent conference speaker and trainer, Jay speaks and trains at the Black Hat and LinuxWorld conferences, among others. He co-authored the Syngress international best-seller Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection (ISBN: 1-931836-74-4) and serves as the series and technical editor of the Syngress Open Source Security series. HD Moore is one of the founding members of Digital Defense, a security firm that was created in 1999 to provide network risk assessment services. In the last four years, Digital Defense has become one of the leading security service providers for the financial industry, with over 200 clients across 43 states. Noam Rathaus is the co-founder and CTO of Beyond Security, a company specializing in the development of enterprise-wide security assessment technologies, vulnerability assessment-based SOCs (security operation centers) and related products. He has contributed to several security-related open-source projects including an active role in the Nessus security scanner project. Renaud Deraison is the Founder and the primary author of the open-source Nessus vulnerability scanner project. He has worked for SolSoft, and founded his own computing security consulting company, Nessus Consulting. Raven Alder is a Senior Security Engineer for True North Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in network security design and implementation. She specializes in scalable enterprise-level security, with an emphasis on defense in depth. George A. Theall is a frequent contributor to the Nessus mailing lists, is the author of several popular Nessus-related tools and has also contributed rewrites of several of the supplemental scripts and associated documentation in Nessus, to be distributed starting with version 2.2.
Reader Reviews
'Nessus Network Auditing' (NNA) is the definitive (and only) guide to the Nessus open source vulnerability assessment tool. I recommend all security professionals read this book. You may start as a Nessus user, but the book will help you become part of the Nessus community. NNA features twelve contributors, but it doesn't suffer the fate of other books with similar high author counts. NNA manages to present fairly original material in each chapter, without a lot of overlap. I credit the lead authors and editors for keeping the contributors on track. They could have reduced the number of crashing printer stories, however. Several chapters stood out from the others. Ch 1 explains the need for conducting vulnerability assessment. Ch 3 makes a good case for always installing from source code and not trusting precompiled binaries. Chs 8 and 9 deliver real value with insights into Nessus internals, such as scanning architecture and the Nessus Knowledge Base. Ch ten presents crude albeit workable ways to measure bandwidth to alleviate loads caused by scans. Ch 11 is an excellent rationale for the Nessus Attack Scripting Language (NASL) written by Nessus' creator. I would have liked to have seen an appendix based on an actual (perhaps sanitized) scan, showing how a security admin selected tests, ran the scan, and validated results. NNA suffers a few problems. A few typos are present, but nothing that distracts from the book's content. I did find the ch 4 author's mention of the TCP "triple handshake" to be odd. While not wrong, this process is usually called the "three-way handshake." The screenshots in appendix B are of poor quality and should be replaced in future editions. Note that the Nessus version used in NNA varies from 2.0.9 to 2.0.10a, and the current edition is 2.2.0. Version creep is part of every technical book, and did not make a big difference at this point. When Nessus 2.4 is released, watch for the adoption of the new BOSS GUI to clearly alter the face of the Nessus interface. Overall, NNA is an excellent technical resource for anyone charged with auditing network security. I have a greater appreciation for the Nessus architecture and its ability to do more in-depth host checks. Motivated readers can use this book to learn how to write their own NASL scripts and effectively deploy a distributed scanning architecture.
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