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
Cyberphobia 