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RE: Top 15 Reasons Why Admins Use Security Scan ners
From: "Starford, Christopher D." <CHRISTOPHER.D.STARFORD () saic com>
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 14:19:56 -0400
Yes I do agree with you Ron that audits in the Corp env's focus more on the financial side. But, where is that financial data (confidential) being passed. Yep, systems of course, that's why the bean counters count on the IT auditor's (i.e. infosec analysts, engineers, and pen testers) to test those systems and in most cases will subcontract out these duties to the experienced IT folks. Also the new Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has placed a great significance on IT, which many Corp env's (i.e. healthcare) are required to follow. As far as tools used, yes there are some out there that use the point and click with the generated canned reports. However, in my past experience and others I know (those smaller INFOSEC groups out there) can not afford to use those expensive tools, which real hackers wouldn't be using in the first place. We wrote our own perl scripts and created our own testing procedures based from all those nice resources google lets use have, and relied on tools like nmap, nessus, sara, lopht crack, john ripper just to name a few. Yes of course some of these tools report false positives, but it is the job of the IT Auditor to evaluate and analyze the results communicating with the sys admins and IT folks being audited. IT auditor should be performing network scans (external/internal), checking firewall/router configs, application tests (i.e if web app, cross site scripting, sql injections, session hijacks), and run non-intrusive scripts on the OS's, even sometimes manually looking at code. Now of course this depends on the time and budget use IT folks have been allotted by the financial auditors. J The Fed environment goes even deeper and has tighter guidelines and IT requirements, so many I don't have time to name them all. __________________________________________________ Christopher D. Starford SAIC Enterprise Security Sulutions
-----Original Message----- From: Ron DuFresne [mailto:dufresne () winternet com] Sent: Friday, April 30, 2004 11:48 AM To: Starford, Christopher D. Cc: 'Harlan Carvey'; 'full-disclosure () netsys com' Subject: RE: [Full-disclosure] Top 15 Reasons Why Admins Use Security Scan ners On Wed, 28 Apr 2004, Starford, Christopher D. wrote:Harlan, I believe many true IT Security Auditors out there would agree that your wrong on this one.Yet, audits in the corp env's tend to focus not on IT nor security, but bean-counting. I've seen as HYarlan mentions that the vast majority of auditors have been of the finnancial category, and clueless about IT and it's processes and such. Now, this is not the auditors fault, but managments, as well as that of the partnering companies that make the request and hire in the wrong folks. Of course then there are the snack-oil IT folks, those that pentest and such with a point and click tool and canned report. A thourough IT sec audiit requires that the audirot become familiar with the org being audited and actually look into system configs. There are many issues in how systems are confuifugered that a point and launch tool are not going to uncover and a canned report will not mention. Thanks, Ron DuFresne ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation." -- Johnny Hart ***testing, only testing, and damn good at it too!*** OK, so you're a Ph.D. Just don't touch anything.
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Current thread:
- RE: Top 15 Reasons Why Admins Use Security Scan ners Starford, Christopher D. (Apr 28)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: Top 15 Reasons Why Admins Use Security Scan ners Ng, Kenneth (US) (Apr 28)
- RE: Top 15 Reasons Why Admins Use Security Scan ners Stuart Fox (DSL AK) (Apr 28)
- RE: Top 15 Reasons Why Admins Use Security Scan ners Stuart Fox (DSL AK) (Apr 28)
- RE: Top 15 Reasons Why Admins Use Security Scan ners Ron DuFresne (Apr 30)
- RE: Top 15 Reasons Why Admins Use Security Scan ners Starford, Christopher D. (Apr 30)