Tenable Blog

The SANS organization released an update of the "Top 20" list of security issues organizations should be concerned about. The updated list includes many specific vulnerabilities, as well as generic guidelines.

The Security Center can use the vulnerability data obtained by Nessus scans, Nessus patch audits and the data obtained by the Passive Vulnerability Scanner (PVS). Combinations of specific IDs, DNS names, results content and open ports can be used to create a "dynamic" asset list. These lists are updated each time a new scan is completed or passive vulnerability data is processed.

Many corporations, particularly in the financial industry, impose an end of year "freeze" on all network changes. This means that no new products or systems may be deployed and any exceptions must be authorized by executive management. This mandate provides unique challenges to an IT director: maintaining a secure network; ensuring compliance with the freeze policy; and evaluating exceptions. Tenable's Passive Vulnerability Scanner can help.

About once a month, Tenable gets a call from an MSP, IDS vendor or SIM vendor that wants to take the output of a Nessus scan and do "correlation". The concept is to do something more intelligent with the IDS events with the knowledge of what is actually on your network.

Nessus 3 users who have subscribed to the Direct Feed service can audit the configurations of many OSes, including OS X. This blog entry will show the basic configuration of an OS X device to allow auditing by Nessus 3.

Configuring Remote Auditing for OS X

The first step to auditing an OS X system with Nessus is to allow remote SSH access. To do this, as an administrator of the OS X system, under sharing, enable "Remote Login" as is shown below: