Proactive Pen-testing On A Shoe-string

Security news and updates for your enterprise

August 30, 2010

Proactive Pen-testing On A Shoe-string

By Taylor Gillespie

Networking a machine, regardless of whether or not it is public-facing, means that the computer is allowing remote access to certain ports for certain services. Many personal computers, running either a Unix-like operating system or a Windows-based operating system, have networking and firewall defaults that need to be tightened down.

Testing for penetration weaknesses becomes paramount to any LAN, whether for taking preventative measures against inside jobs, or for public-facing machines, against the world at-large. Years ago, besides the ubiquity of the wondrous Nmap and tcpdump, the goto application for self-penetration testing was Nessus. It still continues to thrive and is the A-one software suite for monitoring and testing the security of networked machines for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes. Nowadays, with their yearly commercial subscription rates, Nessus is available for only companies with considerable information technology budgets. Most small to mid-sized organizations cannot afford thousands per year on pure penetration and security testing. For those companies, several open source options exist to help test the vulnerability of networked machines.

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