Learning Nessus for Penetration Testing

Cover......Page 1
Copyright......Page 3
Credits......Page 4
About the Author......Page 5
About the Reviewers......Page 6
www.PacktPub.com......Page 7
Table of Contents......Page 8
Preface......Page 12
Chapter 1: Fundamentals......Page 16
Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing......Page 17
The life cycles of Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing......Page 18
Stage 1 – scoping......Page 20
Stage 2 – information gathering......Page 21
Stage 5 – vulnerability exploitation 
(Penetration Testing)......Page 22
Introduction to Nessus......Page 23
Initial Nessus setup......Page 24
The Nessus plugin......Page 25
Installing Nessus on different platforms......Page 26
Installing Nessus on Windows 7......Page 27
Installing Nessus on Linux......Page 33
Definition update......Page 35
Online plugin updates......Page 36
Offline plugin updates......Page 37
User management......Page 38
Adding a new user......Page 39
Changing the password or role of an 
existing user......Page 40
General Settings......Page 41
Feed Settings......Page 42
Mobile Settings......Page 43
Apple Profile Manager......Page 44
Result Settings......Page 45
Advanced Settings......Page 46
Summary......Page 51
Scan prerequisites......Page 52
Scanning approvals and related paper work......Page 53
Configuring a scan policy to check for an organization's security policy compliance......Page 54
Policy configuration......Page 55
Default policy settings......Page 56
General Settings......Page 57
Credentialed scan......Page 60
Plugins......Page 64
Preferences......Page 66
General settings......Page 67
Scan execution and results......Page 69
Summary......Page 71
Chapter 3: Scan Analysis......Page 72
Hosts Summary (Executive)......Page 73
Vulnerabilities By Host......Page 74
Vulnerabilities By Plugin......Page 76
False positive analysis......Page 78
Effort estimation......Page 79
False positives......Page 80
Risk severity......Page 81
Fix recommendations......Page 82
Exploit example 1......Page 83
Exploit example 2......Page 85
Exploit example 3......Page 87
Summary......Page 88
Vulnerability Assessment report......Page 90
Nessus report generation......Page 91
Report filtering option......Page 94
Nessus report content......Page 95
Report customization......Page 97
Report automation......Page 100
Summary......Page 101
Chapter 5: Compliance Checks......Page 102
Audit policies......Page 103
Compliance reporting......Page 105
Windows compliance check......Page 106
Cisco IOS compliance checks......Page 107
VMware vCenter/vSphere Compliance Check......Page 108
Summary......Page 109
Index......Page 110