[NTLUG:Discuss] linux based security tool...recommendation

[MadHat]

On Jan 13, 2004, at 3:10 PM, Cameron, Thomas wrote:
>
> nmap totally kicks butt.

nmap is great and will do a great job of telling you what ports you 
have open and  in many cases what is listening, but will not tell you 
if the daemon listening is vulnerable or not.  Even if you find out you 
have BIND 4.9.2, you still ahve to search securityfocus.com or do 
google searches and find info on the vulnerability, then see if you can 
find a way to exploit it to test if you are vulnerable to attack.  
Nessus will use nmap and run scans on what it finds open.   
Unfortunately there are a lot of false positives with nessus.  Some of 
the nasl scripts are written poorly and ahve hard coded ports, for 
example, so even though it is a web server running on port 25, it tries 
running sendmail vulns, or if sendmail is running on port 80, it will 
runn the sendmail vuln on port 25 whether or not it is open.    But I 
digress.