Finally – A Good Nessus Client

It’s been a while since my last post, but the week was pretty busy so far. I’m afraid it’s not going to get better soon, so don’t expect much news.

Anyway, I discovered an interesting piece of software last week: NessConnect, an improved client for the security scanner Nessus. Latter is a great auditing tool. Of cause it can only discover known vulnerabilities in know software, but still… It’s perfect to quickly see if there are any patches missing or flaws in the configuration of services.

However the lack of a good client software has always a major pain in the ass. The only one that was at least usable was NessusWX, which was recently discontinued. The current official client for Windows and Linux is crap.

NessConnect is cool for a couple of reasons:

• you can preview results during the scan
• scan results are summarized by vulnerability (you can choose level “High Impact”, and a certain vulnerability to see what servers are affected by it)
• it can import NBE files, so you’re able to use the improved reporting on scans you did with a different client
• reports are created by XSLT and can therefore be arbitrarily customized
• it’s open source (as opposed to the Nessus server software itself, which abandoned GPL licensing in 2005)

Things that could be improved:

• resuming scans should be implemented
• there’s a small bug with parsing existing NBE files – it sometimes crashes with the message “unparseable date”. However as it’s open source you can just edit the source and add a try-catch-block around the according parsedate function.

Anyways, have a look at it. If you’re doing internal scans, it’s going to make your life easier.

Picture of CaptPipers Brain on MRI

Google Hosts Your Mail Server

Yesterday I was exploring the possibilities of Blogger (I’m pretty new to this whole blogging thing, remember?) and from there inevitably stumbled across the many Google applications available. I also noticed something that is not brand new, but wasn’t known to me: Google hosts your mail server.

If you sign up for Google Apps, they’ll take care of handling the email service for your domain. You can get practically unlimited users, each with a quota of (currently) about 6GB (if you have a spare $50/user/year, you can raise it to 25gig). This is great especially with the IMAP support that is available since last year. To my knowledge, Google is the only company who provides this service for free. The features are amazing too. They include the possibility to add multiple domains, aliases for users and email lists.

I operate a mail server of my own and my biggest problem is reliability. I can’t put two servers in two locations just for my private email. I used to use rollernet.us as free backup MX, but they are now enforcing the limits for free accounts too. Google has a solid infrastructure and provides what seem to be 7 different MX servers. The chance that one of them is up is (hopefully) rather good.

The only thing that speaks against using this service is privacy. Technically Google is of course able to read all your emails. In their Gmail Terms of Use they state that they will monitor and disclose all information (inclusing the contents of your emails) if “required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request”. Good thing is, as you can use any mail client via POP or IMAP, you can also use S/MIME or PGP/GPG encryption.

Currently Google Apps email service seems to be in beta stage, but let’s just hope it’s here to stay.

Picture of abandoned mailbox by cindy47452